Antisocial, page 4
All things being equal, it’s cooler to be a rebel than an establishment shill. But all things aren’t equal. Some norms—such as welcoming the stranger, or respecting the dignity of women, or resisting the urge to punch random pedestrians in the face—really are worth preserving. It’s definitionally non-edgy to affirm this sort of thing. It feels obvious, sentimental, conformist. Sooner or later, though, most people grow up and stop trying to prove how edgy they are. Sometimes, when everyone in the world is angry at you, it’s because you’re a singularly perceptive iconoclast assailing the hypocrisy of the system. Other times, when everyone is angry at you, it’s because you’re just being an asshole.
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Our hosts on the roof deck were Mary Clare Reim and Yonathan Amselem, a couple in their late twenties who were engaged to be married. They lived in one of the condos downstairs. “Call me Yoni,” he said. “I’m Sephardic, mixed with a bunch of other stuff, but I just let all the protesters think I’m an evil Christian cis white man ’cause it’s better for their narrative.” A corporate lawyer, he had heard about the Proud Boys on The Gavin McInnes Show. “The left is no fucking fun anymore!” he said.
A few weeks before the inauguration, Mary Clare said, McInnes “mentioned on Facebook, or somewhere, that he needed a place to crash in D.C.”
“I offered our place immediately,” Yoni said. “I met him for the first time, like, two hours ago.” He was clearly starstruck. “He walks in, drops his suitcase, and starts changing into his tuxedo, right in the living room, drinking a beer. He’s just, like, himself—the guy from the show—except in my friggin’ apartment.”
“He listens to Gavin every day,” Mary Clare told me. “I can hear him cracking up from the other room.”
“I like Gavin more than a friend,” Yoni said, giggling.*
“Gavin has funny moments, and sometimes he makes actual good points,” Mary Clare said. “But then he’ll talk about diarrhea for twenty minutes and totally lose me.”
“She’s a nice Catholic girl,” Yoni explained.
They resembled a sitcom archetype—the unkempt, heavyset man who, through a combination of haplessness and low-key charisma, ends up with the slender, beautiful blonde. In a departure from the archetype, though, Mary Clare was not a mouthy, long-suffering housewife but a policy wonk.
“I’m an analyst at a think tank,” she said.
“The Heritage Foundation,” he said. “She’s a big shot.”
“To be honest, I had a lot of problems with Trump at first,” she said. “I write about education policy, and a lot of the higher-ed proposals his campaign put out didn’t really add up.” She started to explain, beginning with a few statistics about federal subsidies to universities.
“Aaaand, this is where I start to check out,” Yoni said.
McInnes returned to the roof deck and, with a flourish, introduced two women, one in her midfifties and the other in her early twenties. The older woman handed me her business card, which identified her as an “author and cultural activist” with the Twitter handle @SpankCityHall. “I started the Indiana Tea Party,” she said. “Before that, I was a dominatrix with a dungeon in my basement, and guys paid me to paddle ’em on the ass. Life’s a trip, huh?” She wore a fur vest and a fur cossack hat. “My wardrobe tonight is Russia themed,” she said, “in honor of my hunky alpha-male crush, Vlad Putin.”
One of the Proud Boys, staring at the younger woman, whispered, “Wait, I think I know who that is.” As she approached, he asked her, “Aren’t you Lauren Southern?”
She gave him a long, withering stare. “No,” she said, and walked away.
“Well, shit,” the Proud Boy said. “Someone told me Lauren Southern was gonna be here.”
It was an understandable mistake. Both Lauren Southern and the woman on the roof deck, Laura Loomer, were rising social media stars with peroxide-blonde hair. Southern was perhaps best known for crashing a feminist rally in Vancouver while holding up an antifeminist sign (THERE IS NO RAPE CULTURE IN THE WEST); her YouTube video of the confrontation was viewed more than two million times. Loomer, a strident Islamophobe and conspiracy theorist, kept a lower profile, in part because she had, until recently, worked undercover. She was an employee of Project Veritas, a New York–based nonprofit that tried to undermine liberal institutions through journalistic stings. A few of these were inarguable successes; others backfired humiliatingly; most often, the results were overhyped and underwhelming.*
Fairbanks had settled on a couch, chain-smoking and gazing at the green-glass towers of downtown D.C. Mary Clare sat down next to her and asked, “You have the most Twitter followers of anyone here, probably, right?”
“I guess, except for Gavin,” Fairbanks said. “I have about eighty.”*
“Thousand?” Mary Clare said. “Gosh, that’s awesome. I have, like, none. But all I ever tweet about is student-loan interest rates, so I guess it’s not that surprising.”
Sitting on the other side of Fairbanks was her boss, Mindia Gavasheli, the Washington bureau chief of Sputnik News. He’d worked as a TV producer in Russia—first at two regional networks in his hometown of Krasnodar, then at two national networks with a pro-Kremlin slant—before moving to the United States. Tonight, he seemed thrilled to be among the Deplorables.
“We should have an after-party at the Trump,” he said, referring to the Trump International Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue, which had opened four months earlier.
“I don’t think they’re technically open tonight, but I’ll text the manager,” Fairbanks said. “I’m there, like, every other night, and I tip, so he definitely owes me one.”
Luke Rudkowski sat nearby, watching Facebook Live on his phone. “Alex Jones is streaming from a mile down the road,” he said, chuckling. “Looks like he’s wasted.”
“Amazing, let me see,” Fairbanks said. Rudkowski tilted his phone to let her watch.
Jones was standing in front of the Capitol, swaying gently, speaking with even more ardor and less coherence than usual. In person, he was addressing about a dozen stray tourists; on Facebook, he had a live audience of nearly four thousand. “The arrogant globalists who believe the power of humanity is theirs, because they hijack control of it . . .” He trailed off.
“Oh, shit, is he crying?” Rudkowski said. He and Fairbanks cracked up, but I couldn’t tell whether they were laughing with Jones or at him.
“The rediscovery of our destiny is at hand!” Jones shouted, his face streaked with tears.
“I don’t blame him for crying,” the woman in the fur hat said. “The intelligence agencies are all trying to kill him, you know.”
“We gotta go to the DeploraBall now,” Jones said. “I’m gonna sneak off and piss on some tree or something and we’re gonna get there.”
Loomer sidled up to Rudkowski and perched on the arm of his chair.
“Hey,” she said, in a tone that suggested an intimate rapport.
“Hey,” he said, in a tone that did not.
She sat for a few seconds, trying and failing to meet Rudkowski’s eyes. After a while, she stormed off.
“What’s with her?” Fairbanks asked. Rudkowski didn’t answer.
In a blog post about the Proud Boys, McInnes had written that “the meetings usually consist of drinking, fighting, and reading aloud from Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West,” a book arguing that declining white birth rates and “uncontrolled immigration” would soon result in a “Third World America.” That night, I’d already seen plenty of drinking, and a good amount of vaping. As for fighting, the Proud Boys anticipated it eagerly—McInnes, in particular, kept cracking his knuckles and stretching his neck, like a boxer on the way to the ring. But the part about public reading may have been aspirational; for one thing, McInnes had forgotten to pack a copy of The Death of the West in his suitcase.
“I’ve got one, actually,” Zach said, digging into his backpack. He’d read McInnes’s blog post and planned ahead.
“Nice!” McInnes said. “We’ll do a little toast.”
The Proud Boys gathered inside, most of them holding a beer in one hand and a phone in the other, capturing each other capturing the moment. McInnes gave a brief, rousing speech. “We are here celebrating the inauguration,” he said. “We will be accosted by social-justice warriors that are mad that private citizens are going to enjoy ourselves. But, before we go, I would like to read a brief passage that the Proud Boys thoroughly enjoy.” He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and opened the paperback to the designated page.
“In the story of slavery and the slave trade,” he read, “Western Man was among the many villains, but Western Man was also the only hero. For the West did not invent slavery, but it alone abolished slavery.” For someone who claimed to have a postracial outlook, McInnes spent a lot of time talking about race. He finished reading—“The time for apologies is past”—and started a brief round of applause for himself.
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Lee Atwater, a Republican consultant and the Paganini of the modern political dog whistle, once explained the Southern Strategy, a ploy by which his party used coded racism to appeal to white voters. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” Atwater said. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, it backfires—so you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” Ronald Reagan, running for president in 1980, delivered a campaign speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered sixteen years prior. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan said. When he became president, he hired Atwater as a White House aide, then as the deputy director of his reelection campaign. The day after the 1984 election, which Reagan won in the biggest landslide in American history, Atwater left the government to join a D.C. lobbying firm cofounded by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
Atwater didn’t invent the Southern Strategy. Barry Goldwater used it, unsuccessfully, in 1964; then Richard Nixon won with it, pitching himself as a law-and-order candidate who spoke for what he would later call a “silent majority.” He was channeling the language of Pat Buchanan, one of his top strategists and speechwriters. Buchanan, who referred to himself as a paleoconservative, was a racist by most definitions of the word. “Heredity, rather than environment, determines intelligence,” he wrote, erroneously, in a private White House memo to President Nixon. “And every study we have shows blacks 15 IQ points below whites on the average.” The memo argued that promoting racial integration in public schools was a waste of government money. Buchanan, who went on to become President Reagan’s communications director, was too shrewd to use such frank rhetoric in public, but he often came close. In The Death of the West, he wrote, “In their hearts, who truly believes in the equality of all civilizations, cultures, faiths?”
Before “America First” was Donald Trump’s motto, it was the motto of postwar jingoists such as Buchanan (and, before that, of Nazi sympathizers such as Charles Lindbergh). Before “Make America Great Again” was Trump’s campaign slogan, it was Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan.* Even Trump’s central policy theme, severe immigration restrictionism, seemed to be borrowed largely from Ann Coulter, a fire-and-brimstone nativist who advocated mass deportations and the revocation of birthright citizenship. In her 2015 book, ¡Adios, America!, Coulter called the construction of a physical barrier along the southern border “the only sane, logical thing to do.” A prepublication copy of the book was delivered to Trump Tower in May. The next month, in Trump’s speech announcing his candidacy for president, he said, “I would build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively—I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.” Later, when Trump referred to black-majority countries as “shitholes,” and to African American politicians as “low-I.Q. individuals,” he was just restating plainly what other American nativists had been insinuating, in slightly subtler registers, for decades.
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William F. Buckley Jr., the founding editor of National Review and the foremost gatekeeper of postwar conservative opinion, spent most of his career trying to enforce the bounds of acceptable right-wing discourse. His “great achievement,” The Dallas Morning News wrote in 2004, “was to purge the American right of its kooks”—the extremists, paranoid conspiracists, and unusually virulent racists. It was a testament to Buckley’s stature, and to his magazine’s power as a vector for popular ideas, that these purges were so effective.
Then again, extremism is a relative term. Buckley let a lot of bigotry slip past him. He also produced a good amount of it himself. When he was eleven, four of his older siblings burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort in Connecticut; young Billy cried because he wasn’t allowed to tag along. In 1957, when he was thirty-one, Buckley wrote “Why the South Must Prevail,” a column arguing in favor of legal segregation “for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races.” This was, shamefully, not considered an extreme position at the time.
In 1991, Buckley wrote a book-length essay about Buchanan, who was a merciless critic of Israel. Buckley set out to investigate whether Buchanan’s anti-Zionism was tinged with anti-Semitism. The ultimate verdict was a qualified yes: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.” Buchanan never wrote for National Review after that.
By the standards of a Buckleyan purge, this one was only semieffective. The charge of anti-Semitism clung to Buchanan for years, yet it hardly ended his career. “The greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan,” Buchanan said in 1987, and he set out to fill that vacuum, hosting a nationally syndicated radio show and a talk show on CNN. In 2002 he cofounded a magazine called The American Conservative. His goal, he told an interviewer at the time, was “to recapture the flag of the conservative movement.” The American Conservative was willing to publish opinions that were too edgy, or too racist, for the editors of National Review. By then, no single outlet held a monopoly on acceptable right-wing thought.
Buchanan ran for president as a Republican in 1992 and 1996. Both times, he campaigned on a platform of immigration restrictionism and “Western values.” The nativist faction of the GOP bayed at his dog whistles, but that faction had not yet taken over the party. In 2000, Buchanan ran again, this time pursuing the nomination of the Reform Party. As it happened, one of Buchanan’s potential opponents was an ideologically pliable tabloid celebrity named Donald Trump. “He’s a Hitler-lover,” Trump said of Buchanan. “He doesn’t like the blacks, he doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.” He mused about challenging Buchanan for the nomination of the Reform Party, possibly with Oprah Winfrey as his running mate, but then dropped out of the race without officially entering it.
Was Trump lying in 2000, when he called the Republican Party “just too crazy right”? Or was he lying in 2016, when he ran only slightly to the left of Viktor Orban? It’s impossible to know. Trump has an unusual capacity for self-contradiction, but the trait is hardly unique to him. In the middle of his gimlet-eyed description of the Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater began to wonder whether covert racism was actually a form of social progress. “I’m saying that if it’s getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other,” he said. Atwater had just admitted that an innocuous-sounding policy proposal, such as a tax cut, could be both intended and understood as a stand-in for bigotry; in the next breath, he started to convince himself that sometimes a tax cut is just a tax cut. That’s the strange thing about dog whistles. Sometimes, when it’s convenient, both the hounds and the hunter can forget what all the barking and snarling was about in the first place.
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It was time to go. The Proud Boys tilted back their heads, draining what was left of their beers, and left the roof deck, half the group squeezing into a single elevator car. “I hope I get to whoop some Antifa commie’s ass,” one Proud Boy said, before adding, “in self-defense, of course.” Another Proud Boy paraphrased one of McInnes’s oft-repeated maxims: “You’re not a real man until you’ve had your heart broken, broken a heart, had the shit beaten out of you, and beaten the shit out of someone.”
Halfway down to the lobby, the elevator stopped and a resident of the building got on—a middle-aged African American man, in gym clothes, taking his dog out for a walk. The doors closed, and there were a few seconds of tense silence. The woman in the fur hat spoke first, to no one in particular. “You know,” she said, “Putin’s cock is so big you can see it from space.” Everyone, even the guy in gym clothes, had to laugh at that.
Just before the elevator reached the lobby, Yoni said, “Guys, I gotta fart.”
“Don’t,” Mary Clare said sternly.
He did.
“Dude!” Mary Clare said. “Seriously? In a packed elevator?”
“It’s my country now,” Yoni said, with an impish smile. “I can do what I want.”
The group set off for the Press Club, a twenty-minute walk away. McInnes led the pack, looking wired. He slapped himself on both cheeks, forced a yawn, and bugged his eyes wide. “If no one fights me tonight I’m gonna be so bored,” he said. Turning to walk backward like a tour guide, he gave instructions to the group. “Where’s that tall guy?” he said, summoning the contractor from North Carolina to the front.
