Antisocial, page 44
“Are you a white nationalist?”: There was plenty of reason to think that both men were racists. Both of them dog-whistled so constantly that the better metaphor might have been a teakettle over an eternal flame. And, if that wasn’t enough, there was also more overt evidence. McInnes, in a 2002 interview with the New York Press, was asked whether he was annoyed by his hipster neighbors in Williamsburg. “Well, at least they’re not niggers or Puerto Ricans,” he replied. “At least they’re white.” Yiannopoulos, according to reporting in BuzzFeed, used email passwords that referred to landmark moments in Nazi history, such as Kristallnacht and the Night of the Long Knives. Whenever he was caught crossing a line, Yiannopoulos claimed that he’d been trolling. But an email password is a strange place to try to shock the normies, given that the whole point of an email password is that no one is supposed to see it. Still, even with all this, it was impossible to make an airtight case that either man was an out-and-out white separatist. McInnes’s wife was Native American. Yiannopoulos’s husband was African American. An interracial marriage doesn’t preclude someone from being a racist, of course, but it does preclude someone from joining most white-nationalist groups, or from gaining their support. Indeed, the hardcore alt-right, even when talking among themselves, did not embrace McInnes and Yiannopoulos; they considered them traitors. If McInnes and Yiannopoulos were white nationalists, they were clearly determined to hide it. Asking the question once again, in a televised interview, was unlikely to crack the case.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: SUCCESS AND EMPIRE
“Plus, my daughter loves it”: According to many constitutional scholars, the Trump International Hotel had suddenly transformed, on January 20, 2017, from a flamboyant real-estate investment into a flagrant violation of the emoluments clause. Several of Trump’s cronies and business associates stayed at the hotel during inauguration weekend, paying as much as eighteen thousand dollars for a single suite—either a rip-off, a bribe, or both. A lobbying group hired by the Saudi government had been renting rooms in the hotel for months, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars directly from the Saudi royal family to the Trump Organization.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE BRIGHT DAY THAT BRINGS FORTH THE ADDER
Trump had delivered a speech: From the speech: “Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
PART FIVE: THE AMERICAN BERSERK
“into the indigenous American berserk”: Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997), 86.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: THE EMPTINESS
They were doing this: “The war to disestablish the specifically European nature of the U.S. was fought on several fronts,” MacDonald wrote. “The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where ‘ways of seeing’ are presented to the public.”
“In science there are a thousand bad ideas”: This was part of Pinker’s contribution to a forum, on Slate, called “How to Deal with Fringe Academics.” As it happened, the forum was almost entirely devoted to one academic: MacDonald. “How To Deal With Fringe Academics,” Slate, February 4, 2000, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/02/how-to-deal-with-fringe-academics-5.html.
surrounding Jewish names with triple parentheses: Someone uploaded a browser extension to the Google Chrome store called the Coincidence Detector. The purpose of the extension was to automatically add triple parentheses to any Jewish-sounding name. The lead of a 2016 Forbes article, as transformed by the Coincidence Detector, reads: “With his blunt remarks on immigration, real estate billionaire and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump might be leading the Republican race, but his pool of critics grow every single day—and it now includes an increasing number of fellow billionaires. Crossing bipartisan lines, billionaires like (((George Soros))), Rupert Murdoch, (((Larry Ellison))), Bill Gates and (((Mark Zuckerberg))) have all voiced their support for pro-immigration action, and some have even called out Trump.”
“I’m quite sure she meant that in a racial sense”: Asked about this later, she claimed she’d meant it “in a cutural sense.”
I didn’t give him any of his son’s direct quotes: On The Daily Shoah, Mike Enoch referred sarcastically to “the cat lady that was killed,” and said of James Fields, “He did nothing wrong. Frankly, he should get a medal.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE MOUNTAIN
her friend Rowena: Rowena’s name has been changed.
her friend Sơn: Sơn’s name has been changed.
secret underground bunkers below Denver International Airport: For more on this conspiracy theory, visit www.flydenver.com/greathall/denfiles [inactive].
she met Richie: Richie is an alias.
PART SIX: A NIGHT FOR FREEDOM
“Where everybody lies about everything”: Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 25, 1967, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-politics.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: COMMON SENSE
The new rule raised new questions: Some employees argued that the list of exceptions ought to be more comprehensive; others argued, echoing Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 84, that there should be no list of exceptions, lest people infer that the list was meant to be comprehensive.
About the Author
Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His work has also appeared in Harper's, New York, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and many other publications. A contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour, he has spoken at TED and has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and many other outlets.
*“I’m so brave!!!” said one stick figure, a normie liberal wearing a nose ring. “Parroting the exact same narrative as universities, government departments, schools, the mainstream media, Hollywood, major political parties, and corporations is sooooo anti-establishment.”
*Twitter had rules against harassment, and Facebook had rules against terrorist recruitment, but the rules were enforced casually and inconsistently. Techno-libertarian utopianism was ascendant in Silicon Valley, and most social media executives were determined to moderate their networks as lightly as possible. Besides, when the executives vowed to remove terrorist recruiters from their networks, they didn’t seem to have white terrorists in mind.
*“The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” the editor of a prominent neo-Nazi site wrote in an internal document that was later leaked to the press. “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes.” For legal reasons, he asked his writers to refrain from openly inciting violence; “however, whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of.” The ultimate goal, he wrote, was to “dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths.”
*Yiannopoulos considered attending the DeploraBall, but declined when he wasn’t guaranteed top billing. “He’s got once-in-a-generation, Benjamin-Franklin-in-Paris levels of charisma,” Cernovich said. “And he’s one of the only guys, other than me, who’s doing social media right.”
*“I fast-forwarded her video and she doesn’t show her boobs,” one Twitter user commented below Fairbanks’s tweet.
“Thanks for saving me the time,” another replied.
*When I’d first texted Fairbanks, asking if I could accompany her to the DeploraBall and write a piece about it for The New Yorker, she’d replied, “Is it a hit piece on how the ball is a bunch of Nazis?” She followed this with “haha,” either because she was joking or because she thought it tactically prudent to soften her tone.
*A few weeks earlier, a man had driven from North Carolina to D.C., barged into the restaurant, and fired a semiautomatic rifle; his goal was to “self-investigate” rumors he’d come across online, including the claim that the restaurant’s basement was actually a dungeon full of child sex slaves. (Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement.) The rumors were part of a byzantine conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, according to which many of the country’s top entertainers, journalists, financiers, and politicians, including the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and possibly Clinton herself, were pedophiles and human traffickers. The clues were as elaborate as they were unpersuasive: satanic rituals, a secret code involving the words “cheese” and “pizza,” a map printed on a handkerchief. The theory had been propagated by some of the internet’s most reckless meme hustlers, including Posobiec, Cernovich, and Fairbanks herself.
*A poster for Les Misérables became a poster for Les Déplorables. An ad for the 2010 ensemble action movie The Expendables was transformed, via Photoshop, into The Deplorables: Donald Trump, front and center, flanked by a few fallen politicians (Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani), a few loose-cannon campaign surrogates (Roger Stone, Ben Carson), and a few uncategorizable efflorescences of contemporary internet culture (Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, Pepe the Frog).
*In a 2011 column in Taki’s Magazine, McInnes wrote, “America’s population surge is all Mexican, and I think it’s fair to say we’re not getting their best and brightest.” Four years later, in his presidential announcement speech, Donald Trump said of Mexico, “They’re not sending their best.”
*I’d heard enough of McInnes’s show to know that the Proud Boys considered any version of this joke—the insinuation that their homosocial fraternal organization was actually a homoerotic fraternal organization—to be the soul of wit.
*Throughout the 2016 race, Loomer posed as a Clinton volunteer in several states, wearing a concealed camera and trying to entice campaign employees into saying or doing something nefarious. In almost a year and a half, she documented just one possible violation of campaign rules—a Canadian woman buying a hat and a T-shirt from a merchandise table, which could be classified, technically, as a foreign campaign contribution. When Project Veritas scheduled a press conference to debut this footage—at the National Press Club, incidentally—the big reveal was so anticlimactic that several of the reporters in attendance wondered whether it was a joke. (Not long afterward, Donald Trump signed a letter of intent to develop a Trump World Tower in Moscow.)
*A demicelebrity’s number of Twitter followers was a common proxy for internet fame, albeit a crude one. Many of the DeploraBall VIPs had six-figure follower counts—fewer than the official account of, say, Newsweek, but far more than the average Newsweek reporter. In the months following the DeploraBall, the VIPs’ followings would continue to grow apace. By 2018, many of them—Gavin McInnes, Laura Loomer, Alex Jones—would be banned from Twitter and several other platforms, stifling both their income and their influence.
*Reagan’s version began with “Let’s”—a distinction without a difference, like the eighth note that separates the bassline in “Under Pressure” from the bassline in “Ice, Ice Baby.”
*Best known for acquiring the license of a rare drug and then raising the price by 5000 percent, Shkreli was often called “the most hated man in America.” In addition to his day job as a swindler, he was a prolific Twitter troll. His trolling technique was one of the oldest and simplest in the world: misbehaving constantly, daring people to hate-watch him. He was the unruly kid in the back of the classroom, the one with a bottomless desire for all forms of attention, negative and positive. With the advent of social media, Shkreli had access to hundreds of millions of new ears to flick.
*I found the acronym uniquely galling, for personal reasons. When I was two years old, before anyone had coined the word “MAGA,” I coined the word “Magah,” with two rounded As. It was a substitute for “grandma,” which I couldn’t yet pronounce. It stuck. From then on, according to me, my siblings, my close friends, and my caller ID, my grandmothers were named Magah Dorothy and Magah Clare. “I don’t know how anyone listens to his drek,” Magah Clare said, in the spring of 2016, when I visited her one-room apartment on West End Avenue. We were talking, as everyone was at the time, about Trump. “You know what he is? A gonif. You know that word?” Magah Clare was one of my favorite people in the world—sharp tongued, clear eyed, fiercely intelligent. She grew up in Bensonhurst; her father was a socialist garment worker who spoke almost no English; she read everything, including The New Yorker, but she didn’t have enough money to finish college. Her religions were atheism, workers’ rights, Beethoven’s Seventh, and a keen aversion to bullshit. Throughout 2016, every time we had lunch, she would ask me, rhetorically, what was wrong with people, how anyone could even consider trusting that man. I didn’t have a pithy answer, and she didn’t really expect one. She died in the spring of 2017. The only consolation was that no one ever told her how the gonifs had stolen her nickname, along with everything else.
*After the election, both Flynns were hired by Trump’s transition team. In December, hours after the gunman at Comet Ping Pong was arrested, Flynn Jr. tweeted, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story.” He was fired from the transition team, but his father stayed on.
*“Cuck,” short for “cuckold,” was the Deplorables’ preferred insult of the moment. Only Deplorables and their fellow travelers used the word in earnest; most people found it either jarring or baffling, which was part of the point. A cuckold is a man whose wife is unfaithful or pregnant with someone else’s child. The term has a long history of racist connotations—for centuries, from Othello to The Birth of a Nation to internet porn, white men have expressed their racial anxieties through fiction about black men “taking our women.” But the white nationalists of the alt-right expanded and sharpened the metaphor, conjuring the image of the United States as a damsel with an exposed southern border, her purity at risk of defilement by brown hordes. Whenever a congressperson, especially a white Republican congressman, suggested a bipartisan approach to immigration reform, the alt-right trolls on Twitter were quick to denigrate him as a “cuckservative.” To the alt-right, such congressmen were not merely moderates, or self-interested politicians; they were race traitors.
*There was no party, PAC, or other official organization called the alt-right. There were no membership rolls. The definition of alt-right changed constantly, even within the movement; people who were leaders one week were cast out the next. Most of the alt-right’s adherents were anonymous, and their devotion was inconsistent at best; many would have disavowed their beliefs in an instant if asked by a pollster (or a parent). The movement’s primary home was not in corporeal space but on the internet. The number of people who would be willing to show up at an alt-right rally, or to put up a yard sign for an alt-right candidate, was dwarfed by the number of people who would download an alt-right podcast or post anonymously to an alt-right hashtag. So it’s hardly surprising that, when it came to estimating the size of the movement, there were no solid numbers. Besides, even numbers that were supposed to be solid—e.g., Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers—turned out to be not very solid after all.
*The first few times people told me the source of Spencer’s family fortune, I assumed that they were being facetious. It was too on the nose. Later, I looked it up and saw that it was true: thousands of acres of Louisiana cotton fields, which Spencer’s forebears had owned for generations.
*This was perhaps the starkest iteration of the “Jewish Question”: “Are Jews white?” The civic nationalists didn’t give the question much thought; the white nationalists were obsessed with it, and insistent that the answer was no. When I informed my normie friends that Richard Spencer and his ilk did not consider Jews to be white, my friends tended to react with disbelief, or with a concise rebuttal: “But Jews are white.” These were people who maintained that race was a social construct; and yet they often acted as if the racial categories they’d grown used to were not only meaningful but indestructible.
*“So now the alt-right brand is damaged, it’s associated with Nazism, and normal Americans aren’t gonna support that,” Paul Ramsey, a white nationalist who had formerly identified as alt-right, said on YouTube. “Which is a shame, but it’s really OK. . . . We have our man in office now. We don’t need to call ourselves alt-right.”
*In 2007, Gawker, an irreverent metamedia web tabloid, published a piece alleging that Thiel was gay. A few years later, apparently as retribution, Thiel covertly bankrolled an unrelated invasion-of-privacy suit, brought by the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, which caused Gawker Media to go bankrupt. Thiel later told The New York Times that he saw no contradiction between his plot to exterminate a journalistic outlet and his devotion, as a libertarian, to a free press: “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations.”
*In addition to the contrarian question, Thiel offers a more worldly corollary: “What valuable company is no one building?” He argues that coming up with “good answers” to this pair of questions is a prerequisite to “creating value” and “building the future,” two phrases that turn out to be synonyms, essentially, for becoming a rich tech entrepreneur like Peter Thiel.
