Antisocial, page 39
Had she really been so goddamn weak that all they had to do was charm her, make her feel pretty and popular and needed, and she would drop everything else in her life to chase that feeling? All the warning signs came back to her in a sickening montage. That drive home from Richie’s house, blinking to see the road through tears; setting up her laptop on the kitchen counter. Am I an idiot? she’d asked herself then. Or am I a monster like him? Both, apparently. On some level she’d always known the truth, but it was almost too obvious. Instead of letting herself see it for what it was, she had tried to embellish it into some profound, complicated mystery. First you see the mountain. Then you see that there is no mountain. Then, finally, you start to see the mountain again.
* * *
—
The following August, the one-year anniversary of the infamous Charlottesville rally fell on a Sunday. She was scheduled to work an all-day shift. That was for the best, she decided: it was better to be around people, even people she couldn’t really open up to, than to be alone. She had moved to a suburb in the northeast, staying with her aunt and working at a café that served homemade quiches and jams. Jason Kessler was marking the anniversary by holding a rally in D.C., but nobody in the movement trusted Kessler anymore. Any alt-right group that still had a shred of self-respect, including IE, ordered its members to stay away; Kessler invited Richard Spencer, Chris Cantwell, and David Duke to join him, but they all declined. In the end, Kessler marched with about two dozen misfits and literal Nazis, including a guy with the number 14 tattooed on his face. Samantha checked her phone anxiously throughout the day, but her normie friends were posting about Omarosa and the Space Force and a guy who’d stolen a plane and crashed it off the coast of Seattle. It was as if the anniversary rally wasn’t even happening.
She’d been dating someone for a month and a half, and he seemed to like her so far. “I was mixed up in some pretty extreme political stuff,” she’d told him on their second date.
“Well, whatever it was, it couldn’t have been so bad,” he’d replied. “I know you now, and you’re clearly a good person.”
Was she, though? What about her was good? Some days, she thought, I went through a terrible phase, I made some really inexplicable choices, but I’m still the person I always was. Other days, she thought, Anyone who was smart enough to understand what Richie was saying that night but too spineless to leave him is not a person who will ever deserve forgiveness. She watched Sharp Objects, a show on HBO, and thought about cutting herself; but if she bled enough to make a mess then someone would call an ambulance, and it would turn into a whole thing, and she already had enough reasons to feel ashamed.
She got back in touch with some of her closest childhood friends from New Jersey, people she hadn’t talked to in a long time. She tried to explain where she’d been and what she’d seen, but she could never strike the right tone. When one of them asked her a question, she responded with a self-deprecating joke about her lost year as a secret hipster Nazi, and her friend accused her of making light of the situation: “Why are you always deflecting responsibility?” Samantha rewatched the Nathan Damigo interview on YouTube, the one that had struck her as so polished and eloquent. Now she could only react with rueful laughter and a full-body cringe. But maybe cringing was also a deflection of responsibility? Fuck, man. She couldn’t even do shame right.
Most days, on her way to work, she tried to listen to podcasts that were informative but not at all political. One was an interview with a philosopher named Martha Nussbaum, who talked about moral stigma and the social value of regret. Another was a series about the complex personal lives of the worst people in history, people like King Leopold II and Muammar Qaddafi. Apparently, even if you’d ruined an entire country for generations, or forced multiple young girls to “marry” you, or done other unimaginably heinous things, there were still plenty of people who would be willing to say, after you were gone, “You know, his ideas about health care weren’t all bad” or “Actually, he was always sweet to me.” Did that mean that irredeemable monsters were just effective brainwashers? Or did it mean that even monsters could still have redeemable qualities?
Her friends kept asking her about the alt-right, claiming that they wanted to understand everything, but ultimately they seemed to be looking for reassurance, not understanding. They wanted to know that they were immune—that it had happened to Samantha, but that it could never happen to them, or their husbands, or their brothers, or anyone else they knew. Well, Samantha thought, maybe some of you are immune, but not all of you. Maybe not even most of you.
People acted as if her descent into the alt-right had been caused by something discrete and tangible—that some magic switch had been flipped in her, causing racist propaganda to resonate with her soul in a sinister and specific way. Or maybe they imagined that the magic switch inside her had always been flipped on, that her innate bigotry had always been waiting to rise to the surface. The scarier and more mundane fact was that there was no magic switch. Whenever she tried to examine her most fundamental beliefs and desires—before the movement, during, and after—she didn’t find rage or self-love or a death wish or a lust for power. She found nothing solid at all.
* * *
• • •
When I got an email from a woman saying that she had just left Identity Evropa and wanted to talk to a journalist about it, I was in the conference room on the thirty-eighth floor of the World Trade Center. It was late, and the building was nearly empty, so I had exchanged my cramped office for a room with a view. I called her on Skype. She hadn’t yet told her story to anyone, and saying it out loud made her anxious, so she paced up and down a flight of stairs while she talked, burning off some of her anxiety. Our conversation lasted more than three hours. Every so often, as I took notes, I glanced across the river at the glowing red dial of the Colgate Clock.
It all seemed a bit too pat to be true: damsel in distress climbs to the upper echelons of the organized white supremacy movement, then absconds and tells a Jewish journalist how the whole thing operates. I wondered if she was a plant sent by Project Veritas, or a troll trying to send me on a wild goose chase. Or maybe her story was true but she was telling a sanitized version of it, portraying herself as a hapless victim.
Over the next year and a half, we talked for hundreds of hours, both on the phone and in person. I talked to her relatives and friends. She showed me screenshots and photographs and played me audio recordings. She wasn’t a plant. At first, though, she did try to sanitize her story. It took her a long time to tell me about the Nazi salutes, for example, and then a long time after that to admit that she’d joined in. She kept insisting that she’d never wanted violence to befall anyone for any reason, that she’d never had hate in her heart. I had no way of knowing whether that was true.
Again and again, she asked different versions of the same question: “Do you think I’m a bad person?” I tried answering in several ways, but in truth I thought that the question missed the point. She had obviously made tragically, pathologically bad decisions; and yet I also believe that it’s possible for people who have made terrible decisions to work toward redemption. In the end, it didn’t seem useful to worry about whether she was Bad or Good. Those are permanent metaphysical attributes, and I didn’t think metaphysics had much to do with it.
Sometimes, in the course of my alt-right reporting, I would find myself in the company of someone gleefully, unrepentantly Bad—Milo Yiannopoulos, say, or Richard Spencer—and a familiar feeling would come over me. Around the twentieth time I felt it, I realized what it was: a longing for the same cheap catharsis that I’d experienced when I was nine years old, on my couch, watching Ricki Lake. Where are the bad people? They are on the stage, under the bright lights. Racism does not reside among us, the audience; you can tell because they are the ones being pointed at, and we are the ones doing the pointing.
I don’t mean to imply that there is no moral distance between me and Richard Spencer. What I mean is that white supremacy is not so superficial a problem that it can be solved by getting rid of a few bad apples. You can’t eradicate crime by sending people to jail. You can’t fix the opiate crisis by bombing poppy fields. It’s tempting, but far too facile, to imagine that the way to end racism is to identify the racists, to shame them on Twitter, to punch them in the streets. That may, in some cases, be clarifying; it may produce a temporary victory, or a moment of catharsis; but it doesn’t address the roots of the affliction. What we need, and urgently, is a new moral vocabulary.
In the meantime, what should social networks do about the surfeit of hazardous memes floating around the internet? Let’s say you’re hosting a party in a warehouse. You can’t eradicate all pathogens from the air. You don’t know how many of your guests are sick, and you don’t want to stand outside the front door holding a thermometer and a stethoscope. The best you can do is plan for contingencies. You can ventilate the room, and put Purell on the tables, and install a carbon monoxide detector. If some idiot is going around sneezing in people’s faces, you can ask him to stop, or you can kick him out of the party. You won’t eradicate all disease, but you can keep it from reaching an epidemic threshold.
Some types of people seem to be particularly susceptible to extremist online propaganda: people with weak real-world social ties; people with unstable senses of self; people with too much verbal intelligence and not enough emotional intelligence; people who prize idiosyncrasy over logical consistency, or flashy contrarianism over humble moral dignity. Still, there is no formula that can predict exactly who will succumb to fascism and who will not.* People act the way they do for a million contingent reasons. Nature matters and nurture matters. Some people seem strong but turn out to be weak; some people bear opaque trauma, invisible even to themselves; some people are desperately lonely; some people just want to watch the world burn. We would like to imagine that, in the current year, the United States has developed a moral vocabulary that is robust and widespread enough to inoculate almost all of us against raw bigotry and malign propaganda. We would like to imagine that, but it would be wishful thinking.
PART SIX
A Night for Freedom
Where everybody lies about everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world.
Hannah Arendt, 1967
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Common Sense
A year to the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Cassandra Fairbanks was in New York, taking an Uber toward Hell’s Kitchen, on her way to a party called A Night for Freedom. “The venue is called Freq,” she told the driver. “F-R-E-Q. Some kind of nightclub, I guess.” Next to her in the backseat was Lucian Wintrich, who was clutching a book of philosophical essays by Frank Meyer, a founding editor of National Review. “I get motion sick if I actually read in a car,” he told me. “But I wanted to bring something impressive to fake-read, just in case you’d be around.”
Fairbanks had left Big League Politics to take over Wintrich’s job as the Washington bureau chief of The Gateway Pundit. Wintrich was back in New York, blogging sporadically. “D.C. is exhausting,” Wintrich said. “I can’t tell you how many rooms I’d walk into where people would immediately start testing boundaries: ‘Since it’s just us in here, we can agree, can’t we, that America would be safer and more prosperous as a white country?’ At first you think they’re just being transgressive, until it sets in how many of them are not at all joking.” Almost as confusing as the duplicity of the crypto–white nationalists, Wintrich said, was the erratic behavior of the president. “Where does the political theater stop and the sincerity begin?” he went on. “Sometimes he’ll do something so absurd that I’ll catch myself thinking, Should I try a complete public reversal where I denounce Trump, maybe say the whole thing was a troll all along? Because I do think Trump sycophancy is a sinking ship. But then I think, That would be too much of a stretch, even for me. I do believe most of what I say. About seventy percent.”*
I asked Fairbanks how long she planned to stay on the sinking ship, but she wasn’t listening. Julian Assange had invited her, via direct message on Twitter, to visit him at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and she was busy making travel arrangements.
A Night for Freedom had been organized by Mike Cernovich, who billed it on Facebook as “an environment where free speech and open inquiry are welcome.” He would use it as an opportunity to plug his next project, a documentary called Hoaxed: The Media’s War on Truth. There would also be speeches by Gavin McInnes and Stefan Molyneux, and a DJ duo playing EDM, and a well-stocked bar. “It’s important for our movement that we keep getting together in the same room, keep our momentum going,” Cernovich told me. “Our people should be vibing with each other about art, culture, fitness. Not everything has to be so political.”
For the past few months, he’d been trying to pivot his personal brand away from deplorability. “I don’t want people to think of me as a pro-Trump guy anymore,” he said on Periscope. “I want people to think of me as a mind-set guy, a journalist, a commentator, a social media personality, a filmmaker, an author.” MAGA was a good way to trigger the libs for a while, but all memes eventually outlast their utility.*
As part of his pivot, Cernovich had been sifting through his old tweets and blog posts, culling the most egregious ones.* Finally, he’d deleted his old blog entirely, migrating some of the archives to Cernovich.com, where he also sold Gorilla Mind herbal supplements and a new line of skincare products. The name Danger & Play had invoked nihilism, sadism, misogyny. But Cernovich.com could, in theory, expand in almost any direction.
He got to the venue two hours early and paid the deposit in cash. The previous venue had reneged that morning, and he didn’t want to take any chances. “Welcome to life as a crimethinker, dude,” he said. “I don’t even say very edgy stuff anymore, but this still happens whenever I book anything. Venue gets calls from Antifa, venue owner googles my name, and then it’s, ‘Nope, no freedom of association for you.’” This was another reason for his attempted pivot: life as a dissident was starting to be a drag. Still, whatever happened tonight, he was confident that he’d be able to spin it as a victory. “If we get to have our dance party here, then great. If this venue bails on us, I’ll head over to the Algonquin and do a more exclusive thing, and maybe I’ll do a Periscope—‘See how we’re being persecuted, we need to hang together in these trying times.’ Either way, I’ll find a narrative that works.”
* * *
—
They got to have their dance party. The venue was less than half full, and most of the guests were oddly overdressed. Compared to the exuberant energy of the DeploraBall, the atmosphere now felt sad and stilted, like a wedding reception for an unhappy couple. The DJ duo played a dance remix of “All I Do Is Win,” and a few men in suits bopped rigidly to the music, holding bottles of beer in one hand and checking their phones with the other. Onstage, in front of the DJ booth, two blonde dancers gyrated in sneakers and American-flag leotards.
While waiting in line for a drink, I overheard three separate conversations about the price of bitcoin. I ran into Colin Flaherty, the surly racist from Delaware whom I’d interviewed long ago, in City Hall Park. “YouTube keeps taking down my pages, but my fans keep putting bootlegs of my videos back up,” he told me. “I guess you can only keep the truth hidden for so long.”
Cassandra Fairbanks found me at the bar. “I brought a guest you might want to meet,” she said, introducing me to Chelsea Manning.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Manning. She couldn’t really say. She used the words “infiltrate” and “confront” and “prove that I can enter their spaces.” When she walked away, I asked Fairbanks, Jack Posobiec, and Will Chamberlain what she’d meant. “No idea!” Posobiec said. “I’m pretty sure she’s just our friend.”
Stefan Molyneux took the stage and started giving a spirited speech about his hopes for the future. “I would like to wake up in the morning without feeling like I’m being replaced,” he said. Yoni and Mary Clare, the couple who’d hosted the pre-party before the DeploraBall, found me in the crowd. “When I heard that Molyneux was gonna be here, I bought a ticket right away,” Mary Clare said. “Isn’t he such a brilliant philosophical mind?” Molyneux was trying to articulate the movement’s utopian vision, but his meaning was mostly lost on me. “Virtue is the price you pay to get to the cathedral called love!” he shouted. “They don’t want us to know the truth, they don’t want us to have virtue, so that we never know love!”
Cernovich wrapped up the night’s entertainment by projecting a trailer for Hoaxed. There were urgent, glitchy effects, and an ominous synthesized score in the style of The Matrix. “All media is narrative, and we are in a war of narratives,” Cernovich’s voice narrated. A few frames later, Stefan Molyneux stepped out of a cave and into the light. Title cards:
EVERYTHING
THEY TOLD YOU
IS A LIE.
The next day, Cernovich wrote a post on Cernovich.com called “How A Night for Freedom Changed History.”
* * *
—
Cernovich had bet his career on the assumption that he could say almost anything—that he could use the macrotargeting techniques of shitposting and rage-bait to make himself too big to ignore—and that all would eventually be forgiven. This was the plan underlying much of the Deplorable movement, to the extent that there had ever been a coherent plan. The ranking algorithms on social media laid out clear incentives: provoke as many activating emotions as possible; lie, spin, dog-whistle; drop red pill after red pill; step up to the line repeatedly, in creative new ways. Even if you crossed the line and got banned from one social network or another, there would always be more platforms.
