Antisocial, page 47
*Like all of his writing, it contained plenty of offensive material. Reason No. 1: Women in D.C. are “sloppy, ugly, fat, and don’t care about looking good for men.” Reason No. 7: “There aren’t enough cute white girls for white men who don’t want to date minorities.”
*Once journalists selected a topic to write about, they didn’t even have to pick up the phone to get a quote. They could scan all relevant tweets, searchable by hashtag, and embed a few in the body of the story, before turning to the more lucrative task of writing a catchy headline.
* The list of trending topics looked authoritative at first glance, but in fact it was microtargeted to each user. Many people, including many journalists, didn’t know this—they continued to refer to what was trending and what was not as if these were universal, stable categories. This created a new kind of filter bubble: the more you clicked on stories about soccer, the more you got the impression that the whole world couldn’t stop talking about soccer; meanwhile, your roommate could be forgiven for thinking that everyone was live-tweeting tonight’s episode of The Bachelor.
*In Good Will Hunting, Will interviews for a job at the NSA, but he has no real intention of working for the military-industrial complex. Politicians and deep-state operatives have no compunction about starting costly foreign wars, Will explains to his interviewer, because “it won’t be their kid over there gettin’ shot. . . . It’ll be some kid from Southie over there takin’ shrapnel in the ass.”
*“Facebook shut down Liberty Writers News and its other related brands for relaying news to the public from an independent perspective,” Wade’s campaign website read. “Seeing first-hand what happens when constitutional protections are taken away reignited a long-standing desire within Wade to fight for ordinary Americans.” There is, of course, no provision in the Constitution entitling anyone to a Facebook page; if anything, many First Amendment scholars have argued, the Constitution protects Facebook’s right to ban pages such as Wade’s. In the 2018 election, Wade lost to the incumbent, a Democrat, by 9 percentage points.
*“I’m very busy with the election approaching since it’s a full time job debunking the mainstream media’s lies about Trump and exposing the manipulation of the trending topics on social media which try to cast him in a false light,” he emailed me. “I really wouldn’t care if The New Yorker wanted to put me on the cover. I’m too busy producing my own content that gets seen by way more people than your magazine.”
*Any neutral online space—a trending hashtag, a Wikipedia article, a news site’s comments section—could inspire this sort of spin battle, a free-for-all in which all sides scrambled to persuade onlookers through a combination of cleverness and brute force. Watching this sort of situation play out, I was always reminded of the moment in a basketball game when the ball goes out of bounds and the ref can’t see who touched it last. Half the players point in one direction and the other half point just as insistently in the other, as if, with the right amount of pantomimed indignation, an unfavorable fact can lead to a favorable outcome. And sometimes it can.
*On Twitter, she spelled her name (((Maura Quint)))—an allusion to the Echo, a meme that was coined on Mike Enoch’s blog, The Right Stuff. The Echo was meant to be a slur—a way for anti-Semites to identify and attack Jews—but some Jewish writers and activists had started trying to reclaim it by using it ironically.
*Jones was exaggerating, but not by much. This rebuttal video got more views than Clinton’s speech did on her official YouTube channel.
*At the time, the congressman representing Cernovich’s district was Dana Rohrabacher, an ultraconservative Republican and by far the most Russia-friendly member of Congress. In June 2016, in a secret recording that was later leaked to reporters, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House majority leader, said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
*At the time, he had 109,000 followers. By summer 2019, he had 467,000. By the end of the year, he may have 50,000 more, or he may be banned from the platform.
*From a 2012 post on Danger & Play: “Be honest with yourselves. Women are not interesting. Like my dog, women are cute and adorable and funny when they lash out. (Unlike my dog, women are disloyal.)”
*In 2015, on assignment for Rolling Stone, the actor Sean Penn scored an exceedingly rare interview with the drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was in hiding in the mountains of Sinaloa.
*A few days later, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a variation on an old alt-right meme: “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you that just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.” Cernovich told me, “Don Jr. gets it more than anyone.”
*“The 2000 presidential election is neck and neck,” the paper claimed. “But sorry, Al Gore, the real battle is between George W. Bush and Donald Trump!” David Pecker, one of Trump’s closest friends, had taken over the Enquirer earlier that year.
*From the landing page:
Empty promises echo across the nation every four years; stringing us along as we wait for something good to finally happen. Well it is finally here, and it is real. It is DONALD J. TRUMP.
Below this was a photo of Trump squinting, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance, along with a paradigmatically Trumpian epigraph: “It’s cold outside . . . so where’s the global warming?”
*David Lane, the founder of a white terror group whose members murdered a Jewish radio host named Alan Berg in 1984, coined the Fourteen Words while in prison. The phrase found a new fan base a generation later, not only on YouTube but in some corners of the federal government. In 2018, a web developer named Laurie Voss linked to a press release that the Department of Homeland Security had issued. The title of the document was “We Must Secure the Border and Build the Wall to Make America Safe Again.” “This is an actual story on an official government website with a 14-word headline starting with ‘we must secure,’” Voss tweeted. “This is not an accident.” In 2019, Brenton Tarrant shot a hundred people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing fifty-one. He left behind a seventy-four-page manifesto explaining his motives in question-and-answer form. “What do you want?” one of the questions read. His answer was simple: the Fourteen Words.
*I paid. According to the rules of journalistic ethics, at least as I understood them, I was allowed to pay for my interview subjects’ meals, although they couldn’t pay for any of mine; I was allowed to bring them gifts, but I couldn’t accept gifts from them, or pay them for their time. These rules made sense on their face, but they led to some absurd outcomes. When Milo Yiannopoulos self-published a book on July 4, 2017, Cassandra Fairbanks and Laura Loomer drove to New York for the release party. I met them at Katz’s Deli and bought Loomer an overpriced sandwich. (Fairbanks, a vegetarian, made do with pickles.) There was a cordon of protesters outside Yiannopoulos’s party, and as I crossed it, the pentatonic protest melody lodged itself in my head yet again. Admission to the party cost twenty dollars, and it came with a copy of Yiannopoulos’s book. I didn’t feel great about being used to goose a crypto-fascist’s opening-week sales figures; but I wanted to report on the party, and it didn’t violate any traditional rules of journalistic ethics, so I paid. (The party ended up being too distasteful for me to write about—Yiannopoulos had hired three little people to walk through the crowd wearing yarmulkes, his attempt to mock a rival named Ben Shapiro—but I did meet some useful sources.) A few months later, I ended up in a sad hotel restaurant in Walnut Creek, California, eating dinner with Yiannopoulos and his entourage. When the bill came, he tried to pay it. My fleeting moral intuition was that I should let him—it was the Mercer family’s money anyway—but in the end I insisted on getting separate checks. I was a reluctant institutionalist, and there were enough norms being desecrated everywhere else in the world.
*“No less than the Democrats, the GOP is characterized by a desire to change the essential nature of the United States through unlimited immigration,” he wrote. “In defying political correctness, Trump has made himself politically bulletproof.”
*It was from a Karl Shapiro poem, published in 1940, called “University.” I sat on a concrete landing and read the poem on my phone, then read it twice more. It begins:
To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew
Is the curriculum
and it ends:
the true nobleman, once a democrat,
Sleeps on his private mountain. He was one
Whose thought was shapely and whose dream was broad;
This school he held his art and epitaph.
But now it takes from him his name,
Falls open like a dishonest look,
And shows us, rotted and endowed,
Its senile pleasure.
Later, I read more about the poem and learned which university Shapiro was writing about: his alma mater, the University of Virginia, in the city of Charlottesville.
*As far as I could tell, looking it up later, Citizens for Trump wasn’t a 501(c)(3), or any other kind of registered organization—it seemed to be just a website and a Facebook page.
*This line of argument gained even more force two years later, when The Weekly Standard went out of business.
*The rubric of that piece, appearing for the second time in the magazine’s history, was Annals of Media.
*Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama remained a relentless optimist. He generally portrayed social media as a salutary force, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. “I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president,” he said in 2016. “And the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people.” A commenter on r/The_Donald, responding to Obama’s remarks, wrote, “FUCK THAT LOW ENERGY CUCK!”
*At one point, in Menlo Park, I paid a visit to Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, perhaps the person most directly responsible for determining what the platform’s two billion users saw when they opened their personalized feeds. We spoke for an hour, and I found him to be an astute and generous conversationalist. And that’s all I can say about our meeting, because it was off the record.
*Most social networks had similar bizarro networks—holding tanks for the banned. Twitter’s bizarro network was Gab; people banned from Patreon ended up on Hatreon; for a while, there was an alt-right clone of GoFundMe called GoyFundMe.
*I hadn’t yet met Milo Yiannopoulos.
*This received some titters and a few groans. The MAGA coalition of gay libertarians and homophobic social conservatives was still new, and tenuous. The latter’s attitude toward the former, so far, seemed to be something like: Use gay stuff to trigger the libs, if you must, but don’t press your luck.
*Some people contend that “fake news” was never a useful term, because it never had a universally agreed-upon definition. But many abstract concepts are at least as difficult to define as “fake news,” if not more so. Consider “media.” Or “health.” Or “addiction,” or “unconstitutional,” or “terrorism,” or “freedom.” Few important words have uncontroversial definitions. We muddle through. Arguing about the definitions can be useful in itself.
*As soon as Spicer became a household name, Twitter sleuths started to dig up his most cantankerous old tweets—including a few, spread across several years, in which he revealed his unbridled contempt for Dippin’ Dots, a dessert made of tiny, flash-frozen balls of ice cream. “Dippin dots is NOT the ice cream of the future,” Spicer tweeted, in 2010. Then, a year and a half later: “I think I have said this before but Dippin Dots are notthe ice cream of the future.”
*Marcus’s film includes the six-second clip in which Andrew Breitbart most fully embodies the role of Andrew Breitbart. Slowly and clearly, glaring directly into the camera, he pronounces two words: “Fuck. You.” He pauses for four seconds, his jaw set, his pale eyes sparkling with rage. Then, in a near whisper, as if blowing the seeds off a dandelion: “War.” The object of the “fuck you” was clear enough: the liberals, the media, the cultural Marxists, and so on. The “war” was meant to be a jihad of the spirit, not of the flesh. Breitbart saw evil everywhere—in public universities, in Disney movies, on the evening news—and he considered it his duty, as a cultural revolutionary, to eradicate it. Like most revolutionaries, he was far less articulate about what would come next.
*The New York Post was owned by Rupert Murdoch; LifeZette was a right-wing web tabloid cofounded in 2015 by Laura Ingraham, a Trump ally who would go on to become a Fox News host. Other outlets that became newly prominent under the Trump administration included One America News Network, founded in 2013 as a right-wing alternative to Fox News; The Daily Caller, cofounded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, who also went on to become a Fox News host; Townhall, a conservative site started by the Heritage Foundation; and the openly pro-Trump Breitbart.
*The channers who started the hoax, which they called Operation O-KKK, were apparently just trolling, trying to see whether the normies in the mainstream media would bite. (They did.) But other channers, presumably, were genuine white supremacists, perpetuating the meme in earnest.
*Sic.
*A year later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller served Nunberg with a subpoena requiring him to turn over his email correspondence with Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and other Trump associates. Nunberg reacted to the subpoena with a televised meltdown, crisscrossing Manhattan to give five hours of bizarre live interviews in various cable-news studios. “Isn’t this ridiculous?” he asked a legal analyst on MSNBC, waving a copy of his subpoena in the air. His facial expression was that of a toddler who threatens to run into the street, then glances up to gauge his parents’ reaction.
“No, it’s not ridiculous, Sam,” she said. “It’s so not ridiculous.”
“I’m not going to jail,” he said. “You think I’m going to jail?”
Was it appropriate for MSNBC’s bookers, and all the other TV bookers, to let Sam Nunberg on air? Was it proper for dozens of American news outlets to use Roger Stone, for decades, as a source of insider political information? Was it right for Steve Bannon to be invited, in 2018, to appear onstage at The New Yorker Festival? Should journalists continue to amplify the noxious rhetoric of President Donald Trump?
These men are all known liars; they might also be, depending on how literally or seriously one takes their assorted bloviations, racist demagogues spoiling for violence. Still, they have real power, and one function of journalism is to chronicle and confront those in power. Trolls may be puerile, odious, or dangerous, but they set an ingenious trap. By responding to their provocations, you amplify their message. And yet, if no one ever rebuked the trolls, they would run the internet, and perhaps the world.
*He wasn’t. Corsi had been granted a day pass, but he would never get another one. In 2018, Robert Mueller brought Corsi in for a series of interviews, during which he appeared to perjure himself several times. Mueller later offered Corsi a plea deal, which Corsi refused. “I consider this entire investigation to be fraudulent,” he said.
*Many so-called conservatives—including Yiannopoulos and his boss at Breitbart, Steve Bannon—were starting to push the idea that Twitter and Facebook and Google were monopolies, and that the government should consider breaking them up. This idea spread across the Overton window from both directions until, in 2017 and 2018, it became one of the rare talking points to gain traction on both Democracy Now! and Fox News. “Google’s existence, Google’s power, raises real questions about whether you can have an actual democracy,” Tucker Carlson said in September 2018. “This is not the capitalism I signed up for.”
*“I get along with everyone,” Wintrich once told me. I’m very open minded.” This turned out to be an understatement. He was the kind of person a teacher of mine once warned me about—once warned me, in fact, not to become: a person so open minded that his brain could fall out.
*It also seemed strangely, even insultingly hierarchical. Was it really soft-pedaling to call someone a misogynist or an Islamophobe rather than a racist? Was it so self-evident that one form of bigotry was more unacceptable than another?
*The four of them had met for the first time on inauguration weekend, but they’d since become fast friends; when the Amselems got married a few months later, Wintrich and Fairbanks attended the wedding.
*“My mom happens to be Jewish,” Chamberlain added. “Even if she weren’t, though, I’d like to think that being anti-anti-Semitic would still be an easy call.” Yet he remained a steadfast champion of the alt-light, despite its repeated lapses into nativism and misogyny and xenophobia. “I try to look at how persuasion actually works in the world,” Chamberlain told me. “Ted Cruz wins on purely logocentric terms, but Trump outpersuades him every time.” Talking to Chamberlain about politics felt a bit like talking to a young-earth creationist about dinosaurs. I considered some of his core beliefs (for example, that Donald Trump should be trusted with a nuclear arsenal) to be irrational almost to the point of incomprehensibility; but once we agreed to disagree on a few core premises, we could start to have a conversation. Ultimately, I thought of him as a hypercontrarian—the kind of guy who was so eager to be red-pilled that he would swallow any capsule with a pinkish hue, without first bothering to check whether it was laced with hemlock. In the 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger coined the phrase “cognitive dissonance” to describe a mental state caused by trying to hold two or more irreconcilable beliefs simultaneously. The more obviously the beliefs clash, Festinger posited, the greater the believer’s need for “social support.” Thus, the more time passed without Jesus returning to Earth (or without Trump starting to act “presidential”), the more loudly and desperately the millennialist Christian (or the ardent Trumpist) could be expected to proselytize to the unconverted.
