Antisocial, page 5
The Proud Boys walked in the shape of an upside-down V, taking up the width of the sidewalk; the women huddled behind them, shielded from view. “Remember, guys, the whole point is to protect the ladies,” McInnes said. His chivalry, however, did not extend to slackening his pace. The women had to remove their high heels and trot to keep up.
While the Proud Boys were stuck at a corner waiting for a WALK sign, a guy on a bicycle stopped and shouted, “Fuck Trump!”
“What’d you say?” Zach snapped. “Say that again, pussy!” Trembling with adrenaline, he glanced toward McInnes to see how his show of bravery was going over. But McInnes, who was busy chatting with Fairbanks, hadn’t noticed.
The man threw his bicycle to the ground and started to approach, looking a bit bigger with every step. “Sure, I’ll say it again,” he said. “Fuck. Trump.”
The light changed. Zach put his head down and kept walking.
* * *
—
A block away from the Press Club, we began to hear the roar of the crowd. Fairbanks put on her poncho. Rudkowski started filming on his phone. “Bravest men in front!” McInnes shouted. “Tight and close! Women in the middle!”
We rounded the corner. The street, closed to car traffic, was filled with hundreds of protesters. Masked figures darted through the crowd, waving the red-and-black Antifa flag; flames leapt out of metal trash cans; a boom box was playing a slow rap beat, and rim shots reverberated between buildings. A row of police officers, wearing neon-green vests and holding plastic shields, stood shoulder to shoulder, creating a buffer between the protesters and the partygoers. “Have a nice time, Nazi scum!” one protester shouted at a silver-haired couple as they walked inside. Other protesters confronted the police officers, singing an old union song with a haunting pentatonic melody: “Which side are you on? Which side are you on?”
A few of the protesters found a way around the police line and stood between the Proud Boys and the entrance. McInnes, trying to lure one of them into a fight, licked the man’s face; he recoiled, shouting, but didn’t fight back. Another protester, wearing a black ski mask and carrying an Antifa flag, passed by McInnes without incident, but McInnes shoved him anyway, then punched him in the face. “What the fuck?” the man shouted. Two police officers rushed to arrest the protester, while several other officers escorted McInnes into the Press Club.
In the lobby, unscathed, Fairbanks took off her poncho and straightened her dress. “We made it!” she said. “Thank you for protecting me.”
“Don’t mention it, m’lady,” McInnes said.
Zach tried to sneak in with the group, but the guards stopped him. The rest of the Proud Boys disappeared inside, the doors clicking locked behind them. Zach, alone now, turned to face the roaring crowd. Until that instant, he’d been borne along by triumphal, unthinking energy; now, suddenly, he wondered why he was there in the first place, how much any of this mattered. He wished he could dematerialize and reappear at home, in his family’s warm, brightly lit living room, watching a baseball game with his dad, or reading on his phone—thinking about anything other than politics. He took off his red MAGA hat and stuffed it inside his blazer, the better to blend in with the crowd. Then he speedwalked to the end of the block, turned a corner, and disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER THREE
The Contrarian Question
Roger Stone stood in the lobby of the Press Club, wearing a tuxedo and radiating indignation. The organizers of the DeploraBall hadn’t set aside enough tickets under Stone’s name, so he and his entourage—a few friends and family members, and a camera crew from Vice News—had decided to leave. “This is an insulting absurdity,” Stone said on his way out.
It was hardly his most pressing problem. Earlier that day, he’d received a call from a New York Times reporter. The paper was about to break the news that the FBI, NSA, and CIA were all investigating whether Stone had colluded with Russian operatives on behalf of the Trump campaign. “Here’s my on-the-record quote,” Stone had told the reporter. “Bullshit. Nonsense. Totally false.”
After Stone left the party, I followed Fairbanks and the Proud Boys inside the Press Club and up to the thirteenth floor, where they walked down a plushly carpeted hallway, past the Bloomberg Center for Electronic Journalism, looking for the open bar in the First Amendment Lounge. A news crew stopped McInnes for an interview, and he regaled them with the story of his scuffles outside. He didn’t claim self-defense. “I saw this Antifa guy carrying a cardboard flagpole, as required by law, and I got so mad that a so-called anarchist was following the cardboard regulations,” he said. “So I punched him.” He repeated the tale throughout the night, on and off camera, keeping the main plot points consistent but heightening the incidental details a little more each time. “I think that when I punched him, my fist went into his mouth and his teeth scraped me on the way out,” he told one reporter. “Now I might get loser AIDS.”
We kept moving toward the bar. In my peripheral vision, I saw a hunched, spectral figure who looked like a desiccated Matthew Broderick. “OMG, it’s Martin Shkreli,” Fairbanks whispered. Shkreli, a sinister pharmaceutical entrepreneur, was then under federal indictment for securities fraud.* I tried to introduce myself, but he emitted a guttural, nonsyllabic noise and slipped away into the crowd. At some point, Rudkowski drifted from the group; the next time I saw him, he was in a corner chatting with a perky blonde in a baby-blue taffeta dress. “Oh, that’s Lauren Southern,” the Proud Boy who had confused her with Laura Loomer said. “Yeah, she is way hotter.”
Fairbanks, walking in front of me, rummaged through her purse, found her Comet Ping Pong and Pepe the Frog pins, and affixed them to her dress. There were about a thousand guests at the DeploraBall, many of whom had paid between one hundred dollars and twenty-five hundred dollars to get in. Almost everyone wore at least one piece of flair: a Legal Immigrant T-shirt; an Adorable Deplorable sash; a Germans for Trump button; MAGA hats in red, white, blue, black, pink, camo, silver, and gold.
Just before Fairbanks reached the bar, a partygoer tapped her on the shoulder. She gave him the one-way-mirror stare of the famous and semifamous: he knew her, but she didn’t know him. “I follow you!” he said. “I love all your stuff! Lemme get a selfie with you?” He and a friend flanked Fairbanks, ready to pose. She shot me a look of gratified resignation—duty calls—and I left her behind to minister to her fans.
I walked past an easel, prominently placed and brightly lit. It held an oil portrait: George Washington, in three-quarter profile, wearing a MAGA hat. Under normal circumstances, a cheeky depiction of a Founding Father wouldn’t bother me. All things being equal, why not stick it to the Man? Similarly, if forced to choose between placing my trust in either a swaggering, rebellious citizen or the CIA, I’d usually be inclined to side with the rebel. And yet. And yet when the CIA says that an allegation of election interference is worth investigating, and a dissembling dirty trickster says that it’s not, I’m afraid I have to trust the CIA. Question some things, but don’t go crazy. Of all that I resented about the Deplorables, one of the things I found most irksome was that they forced me to think like an establishment shill.
* * *
—
All night, in every room of the Press Club, I heard partygoers using the acronym MAGA. They used it as a verb (“I can’t wait to MAGA!”), as an adjective (“Ain’t no party like a MAGA party”), and as a stand-alone interjection (“MAGA!!!”). For a year and a half, on every social media platform, the Deplorables had waxed breathless about the extent to which they and their MAGA brethren were about to MAGA until every last shitlib had been pwned and rekt and BTFO’d. To hear them talk, though, it seemed clear that few of them had ever said the words out loud. For one thing, they couldn’t even agree on whether the first A in MAGA should be rounded or unrounded.*
I ran into Mike Flynn Jr., whose father, General Mike Flynn, was the incoming national security adviser. “Follow Mike @Cernovich,” General Flynn had tweeted a month before the election. “He has a terrific book, Gorilla Mindset.” The recommendation likely came from Flynn Jr., a Cernovich superfan and a fervent Twitter conspiracy theorist.* I asked Flynn Jr. why his name hadn’t appeared on the DeploraBall’s VIP list. “I’m keeping it low-key tonight,” he said. “I’m just a fan of these guys.”
In my left hand was a small white reporter’s notebook, spiral bound at the top. I carried it for most of the night, even when I wasn’t taking notes, as a form of ID. (The only thing worse than a reporter was a sneaky reporter.) Several of the Deplorables, eyeing the notebook, made sure to tell me exactly how they felt about the media. I heard many variations on the same icebreakers: “Are you gonna write something nice about us, or are you gonna write fake news?” “You’re not planning to call us white supremacists, are you?” A few people asked about my motives—sometimes in an inquisitive spirit, sometimes in an inquisitorial one.
I had a simple rule for this sort of situation: no matter what I was asked, I would never lie. I answered most questions forthrightly and thoroughly, but sometimes, when I thought that a fully candid answer might get me ejected or assaulted, I mumbled something true but evasive, then changed the subject.
“So what’s your angle, partner?” a man shaped like a professional wrestler asked me. He was wearing sunglasses despite the ballroom’s darkened interior.
“Oh, you know,” I said. “Trying to meet people and ask them questions.”
He perched his sunglasses on his forehead and rested a thick hand on my shoulder. “You know what I mean,” he said, with a smile that did not seem designed to put me at ease. “Where’re you coming from? Politically.”
I paused for a moment, considering several possible answers, and then chose one. “Look at me,” I said. I swiveled my head owlishly, letting him take in the view from all angles: pallid, angular face; red beard; dorky horn-rimmed glasses. “I live in Brooklyn,” I continued. “I write for The New Yorker. I have a single-speed bike. Take a guess, and your guess is probably close enough.”
The wrestler was tickled by this. “Get a load of my dude over here!” he said, beckoning to his date. Then, to me: “You stand here and you tell her exactly what you just told me. I’m gonna go get us all beers.”
One woman, without a word of introduction, grabbed me by the wrist and led me out of the ballroom to a small, windowless hallway near the Fourth Estate Restaurant, where her date was sitting by himself and vaping. He looked up at us impassively while she jabbed a finger in the general direction of his face. “He’s Spanish!” she said. “Sheriff Clarke is here, an African American gentleman, and everyone is treating him with nothing but respect! Do we look like Nazis to you?” I wrote down what she was saying, then handed her my notebook and asked her to share her name and email address. Instead, she tore out the page with her words on it, ripped the page to shreds, and scattered them like confetti on the carpet.
* * *
• • •
The prevailing mood inside the ballroom was mirth with a base note of rage. Any familiar three-syllable chant—“Drain the swamp!” or “Build the wall!” or “Lock her up!”—could be initiated by anyone at any time, with no more effort than dropping a match in a dry forest. Yoni, carrying a bourbon cocktail in each hand, tried to invent a chant of his own: “We like fun!” It didn’t take.
Cernovich, the emcee for the evening, walked onstage, stood behind a lectern, and called for the crowd’s attention. He wore a suit with no tie, fashionably mussed hair, and a week’s worth of stubble. (From a distance, he could pass as vaguely Schwarzeneggerian.) Behind him was a blue Trump banner and a flagpole flying a limp American flag. “It’s good to see everyone from Twitter here in real life,” he said. “We ran Twitter during the election.”
“We still run it!” a partygoer shouted.
Cernovich had an adenoidal tenor and a lisp, and he spoke in a clipped, fitful cadence, wheeling his wrists in tight circles whenever he got nervous. Still, he could be an effective orator when he was indignant. “The fake-news media didn’t want to talk about real stuff,” he said. “But we talk to the people, and that’s why I knew Trump would win.” The editorial “we” referred to Cernovich Media, a name he had invented for a media brand consisting of himself.
He mentioned Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, and the crowd booed on cue. Ryan was a rock-ribbed conservative, not a transgressive culture warrior, and the Deplorables considered him yet another Deep State snake. “Some people call him Cuck Ryan,” Cernovich mused. “But this is family friendly, so I’m not going to call him Cuck Ryan. You won’t hear me say that tonight.”*
Cernovich invited a few other VIPs to the stage, one by one. James O’Keefe of Project Veritas said, “I’ll make it public: I’m going after the media next.” Laura Loomer, his former employee, sat at the bar texting. No female speakers were summoned to the stage. “We love President Trump, and it’s not a political thing,” Jack Posobiec said. “We found that we were living in a situation where truth was fake and fake was truth and news was lies and we all knew about it but nobody was talking about it and there were some problems in our country and we said, ‘We’re gonna do something about it and you can’t shut us up.’”
Between speeches, Cernovich curated a feeble variety show. A speed painter from Staten Island unveiled a caricature of a muscle-bound Trump. A folk singer strummed “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on an acoustic guitar festooned with a QR code. An aspiring pop star, who looked like a member of One Direction crossed with an apricot pug, performed his one viral hit, an Auto-Tune-heavy whine-rap anthem called “Trumpified.” (“In debt to our ears, but please have no fears / The Trump is here / Oh, hell yeah.”)
Shortly before Gavin McInnes was called to the stage, I asked him what he planned to talk about. “Oh, the usual—race and IQ,” he said. “And the JQ, of course.” By “race and IQ,” he meant an idea that had been repeatedly debunked but had never fully gone out of style: that white people were genetically smarter than black people. The JQ stood for the “Jewish Question,” which came in familiar flavors (“Why are Jews overrepresented in media, academia, and banking?”) and more ominous ones (“What should we do about the Jews?”). McInnes was joking—whether he was tempted to talk about those topics onstage or not, he knew better than to try it. In theory, he and the other DeploraBall VIPs were free-speech absolutists who believed that any idea ought to be permissible in any venue. In practice, they knew that certain subjects should only be broached in private, or via dog whistle.
Glancing at the notebook in my hand, McInnes sighed and clarified. “Look, I’m not alt-right, dude,” he said. “They care about the white race. We care about Western values.” Some of his allies had taken to calling their ideology “civic nationalism,” as opposed to white nationalism. Until recently, the white nationalists and the civic nationalists had sustained a shaky alliance, both groups affiliating themselves with the big-tent faction known as the alt-right. Now a branding war was starting to tear the movement apart.
* * *
—
During the long 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump seemed to draw on pools of dark energy not previously observed within the universe of the American electorate. The mainstream media, eager to name this newly visible category of voter, used a catchall term: alternative right, or alt-right. The word fit nicely in headlines and chyrons, and it appealed to newspaper editors and TV-news producers who hoped to connote frisson and novelty without passing explicit judgment. Instead of denouncing the alt-right, reporters often described it as “divisive,” or “racially charged.” They tried to present both sides neutrally, as journalistic convention seemed to require.
The definition of alt-right continued to expand. By the summer of 2016, it was such a big tent that it included any conservative or reactionary who was active online and too belligerently antiestablishment to feel at home in the Republican Party—a category that included the Republican nominee for president. This was an oddly broad definition for what was supposed to be a fringe movement, and yet no one seemed eager to clear up the semantic confusion. The Clinton campaign played up the alt-right’s size and influence, while the alt-right was all too glad to be perceived as vast and menacing. There was no way to measure precisely how many Americans were alt-right, and there never would be. Estimates ranged from a few hundred to a few million. Still, what mattered was not the movement’s head count but its collective impact on the national vocabulary.*
Throughout the campaign, the tent stayed big. “We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Steve Bannon said in July 2016, when he was running the pro-Trump web tabloid Breitbart. Later that year, after leading the Trump campaign to victory and being tapped to serve as chief White House strategist, Bannon claimed that he’d only meant to align himself with an insurgent brand of civic nationalism, not with ethnonationalism. Yet a core within the movement still insisted on a narrower definition of alt-right, one based on explicit anti-Semitism and white supremacy. This core had always existed; no one who was versed in the far-right blogosphere could have missed it.
Mainstream journalists, or at least the ones who were paying attention, were daunted by the fiscal precarity of their industry, the plummeting cultural authority of their institutions, and the unpredictable dynamics of social media outrage. The more these threats loomed, the more journalists clung to one of the few professional axioms that still seemed beyond dispute: in all matters of political opinion, a reporter should strive to remain neutral. This is true enough, for certain kinds of journalists, when applied to certain prosaic debates about tariffs and treaties. When it comes to core matters of principle, though, it’s not always possible to be both evenhanded and honest. The plain fact was that the alt-right was a racist movement full of creeps and liars. If a newspaper’s house style didn’t allow its reporters to say so, at least by implication, then the house style was preventing its reporters from telling the truth.
