Antisocial, page 7
An Infowars reporter pulled McInnes aside for an on-camera interview. Once again, he repeated the tall tale of his brawl with the Antifa protester: “My fist went into his mouth, and I felt his tongue—it was like holding a boa constrictor’s clit.”
Two drunk partygoers, watching the interview, dared each other to walk into the frame:
“Jump in front of the camera and say ‘Bill Clinton is a rapist.’”
“Bill Clinton is a racist?”
“Dude, no. ‘Rapist.’”
“I can’t troll Infowars with that meme. Infowars invented that meme.”
Cernovich saw Spencer and walked halfway down the block to avoid him. A few of the other VIPs, however, inched closer to Spencer—he was notorious, but notoriety was a kind of currency. Fairbanks kissed him on the cheek and they started talking without preamble, as if continuing an ongoing discussion. Earlier, when I’d texted her to ask when I should arrive at her house, she’d replied, “One person wants to leave before you get here. . . . He’s a pretty controversial figure.” It now seemed clear, although she would neither confirm nor deny it, that the controversial figure had been Spencer.
He posed for a photo with Laura Loomer, who draped a hand on his shoulder. “I’m Jewish, you know,” she said as they smiled for the camera.
“Yeah, no shit,” Spencer said, between clenched teeth.
“How do you know, from my Twitter?” Loomer said.
“Yeah, and from your nose,” Spencer said.
Loomer was having a rough night. She had come to D.C. under the impression that she and Rudkowski were dating, only to realize, after watching him flirt with Lauren Southern all night, that her impression was mistaken. “I talked to him last month, and he said, ‘If I end up going to the DeploraBall, I’ll definitely go with you,’” Loomer told me. “I guess he’s full of shit, like everyone else.”
Yoni shook Spencer’s hand and asked for a photo. “I don’t mean to bother you,” he said. “I’m just some random guy.”
“Not at all,” Spencer said. “That’s why I’m here.” They chatted for a minute, bonding over their mutual distaste for Angela Merkel.
After Mary Clare took their photo, Yoni turned to Spencer and said, “You’re a lot nicer than the internet makes it seem.”
“I’m a nice guy!” Spencer responded. “I’m just misunderstood.” He looked Mary Clare up and down, then turned back to Yoni. “Dude, she is way better looking than you,” he said. “Does she have blackmail material on you or something?” Yoni’s smile faded. Spencer’s did not. It seemed that he was earnestly trying to deliver a compliment, but that he didn’t quite know how to pull it off.
While most people gravitated toward Spencer, Spencer gravitated toward me, the only mainstream journalist within his line of sight. Having been prohibited from entering the DeploraBall, he had instead spent the evening “having dinner and drinks with some friends nearby.” One of those friends was Mike Enoch, from New York City. Enoch was a pseudonymous alt-right podcaster and one of the cofounders of The Right Stuff. A week earlier, Enoch’s real name and address had been revealed against his will—a form of retribution known online as doxing—putting his job and his marriage in jeopardy. He and the others were still out drinking, but Spencer had left them, he said, “to come here and maybe inspire some people to join us, if they want a real dissident movement.”
I brought up Hailgate. “I admit, I was being naughty and provocative,” he said. “Sometimes you have to shock the bourgeoisie. And look, I got a lot of negative blowback from it, but I also got thousands of new followers.” I asked whether he’d always disliked Cernovich and the other DeploraBall organizers. “Oh, we all played nice during the election, and some of them are still nice behind the scenes,” Spencer said. “But now they’re trying to pull off a kind of Goldilocks strategy—edgy but not too edgy. It’s not going to work. The alt-right without racial realism? It’s just Trump cheerleading.”
“What are the key texts of the alt-right movement?” I asked. “Who is its intellectual leader?”
He gave me a withering look, implying that this was a stupid question. “I am,” he said.
On the ground was a picket sign that a protester had left behind: POVERTY IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. A Proud Boy picked it up and handed it to Spencer. He held the sign with one hand and balled the other hand into a fist, raising it in a gloved power salute.
Fairbanks, laughing, took a photo. “Can I tweet this?” she asked.
“Go right ahead,” Spencer said. “I’m not even sure I disagree with this sign’s sentiment, honestly.”
“God, I’m gonna get so much shit for posting this,” she said. The prospect seemed to delight her. “Maybe I’ll put it on Instagram, too.”
Spencer left for the DeploraBall’s unofficial after-party at Shelly’s Back Room, a cigar bar across the street. Fairbanks stayed behind and finished her cigarette. “He’s not so scary, right?” she asked me. “I’m still a hippie at heart, I guess. I just want everyone to get along.”
* * *
—
Spencer spent more than an hour at the after-party, antagonizing everyone he could find. Several of the DeploraBall’s guests took the bait, apparently eager for a fight. “How exactly are you gonna make America whites only?” a tall, bearded alt-light blogger named Jack Murphy asked Spencer, shoving him in the chest. “Cattle cars? What’s the plan, dude?”
Mike Cernovich pulled them apart and talked Murphy down. “Handle your shit later if you want,” Cernovich said. “But this place is full of journalists. You throw a punch, that becomes the story.”
Before I left the cigar bar for the night, I checked in with Cernovich one last time. The DeploraBall had ended with no Sieg Heils, no vandalism, no serious rule breaking. “I think we pulled it off,” he said. “High energy, low drama. We’re setting a template for what the new right wing looks like.” He invoked the Overton window, a metaphor invented in the 1990s by a libertarian think tank to explain how cultural vocabularies fluctuate over time. Ideas in the center of the Overton window are universally acceptable, so mainstream that they are taken for granted. The outer panes of the window represent more controversial opinions; radical opinions are close to the window’s edge; outside the window are ideas that are not just unpopular but unthinkable.
The point of the metaphor is that unthinkability is a temporary condition. The window can always shift. “Right now I’m seen as this fringe lunatic, and all the people you met tonight are seen that way,” Cernovich said. “But there are more of us than people realize, and we’ve tapped into something more powerful than they understand. The window is not static, bro. They can’t keep calling us fringe forever. Wait two years, five years, ten years. You’ll see.”
* * *
• • •
The day after the DeploraBall, Richard Spencer attended the inauguration wearing a tie, a red MAGA hat, and a rain poncho. “Crime and gangs and drugs . . . have stolen too many lives,” Trump said. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” When the speech was over, Spencer stood just outside the security gates and opened Periscope, the video-livestreaming app owned by Twitter. With his phone’s camera on selfie mode, Spencer ad-libbed for an online audience of more than twenty thousand people. On the street behind him, strangers passed by without glancing in his direction. “I was afraid that Trump was going to—maybe not cuck out, but kinda try to evoke Kennedy,” Spencer said. “He didn’t . . . and I think that’s a great thing. It was a populist speech. He was talking about identity.”
“Hail the chief,” a commenter wrote.
“Hail victory,” another wrote.
“He did not address the JQ,” someone complained.
“Richard,” another commenter wrote, “Cassandra Fairbanks thinks you’re cute.”
As the crowd filed out behind him, Spencer continued his exegesis of Trump’s first inaugural. “Stephen Miller probably wrote it,” he said. “I like Stephen Miller in terms of his hard-hitting stuff; in terms of poetry, it wasn’t that great.” Miller, Trump’s thirty-one-year-old chief policy adviser, was an undergraduate at Duke when Spencer was a graduate student there, and they were both members of a small club called the Duke Conservative Union. “We knew each other quite well,” Spencer had told me the previous night. “I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up on that connection.”
The morning after the election, an alt-right blogger called Vox Day published a blog post celebrating all that the movement had achieved. “This is your victory, all of you who voted for Trump, who memed for Trump, who donated to Trump,” he wrote. But he exhorted his readers to keep up the pressure. Trump’s election was only one step toward the larger goal of establishing a white ethnostate. “Donald Trump has a lot to do,” he continued. “It is the Alt-Right’s job to move the Overton Window and give him conceptual room to work.”
* * *
• • •
A few hours after the inauguration, on a street corner in downtown D.C., Richard Spencer gave an interview to an Australian news crew. A protester hovered in the background of the shot, holding a sign that read WHITE LIVES MATTER TOO MUCH. Other protesters interrupted the interview, peppering Spencer with questions:
“Are you a neo-Nazi?”
“No, I’m not a neo-Nazi.”
“Do you like black people?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Would you marry a black woman?”
No response.
Spencer was asked about a green lapel pin he was wearing.
“It’s Pepe,” he explained. “It’s become kind of a symbol—”
Before he could finish the sentence, an Antifa protestor in a black ski mask swooped into the frame and punched Spencer in the side of the head. Spencer staggered sideways, his fashy haircut askew.
I was a few blocks away, walking to the Airbnb where Lucian Wintrich was staying for the weekend. “Holy shit, you’re gonna love this,” he said as I opened the door. He had a dozen tabs open on his laptop, each displaying a different Spencer getting punched. It had taken only a few minutes for the incident to be transformed into a meme—for a flesh-and-blood street clash to become just another thing on the internet. (Soon, the footage would be remixed with hundreds of backing scores: Bruce Springsteen, Chance the Rapper, Celine Dion, the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song.)
Wintrich, smoking a cigarette, kept opening new iterations of the meme, guffawing at each one.
I suggested that sucker punching anyone, even one’s enemies, might not be a good idea, morally or tactically.
“Whatever, fuck that asshole,” Wintrich reasoned.
He said that he resented Spencer for making the rest of the Deplorables look bad by association. I also suspected, although of course Wintrich wouldn’t admit it, that he was envious of Spencer’s newfound viral fame. “He’s reaping what he sowed,” Wintrich said. “I don’t even think he’s a real white supremacist, anyway. I think he’s a leftist CIA plant sent to discredit our movement.”
“How much of what you say do you actually believe?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he looked up at me and grinned. There would be more inauguration balls that night, both official and unofficial, and Wintrich had an ambitious party hopping itinerary ahead of him. “Hold this,” he said, handing me his burning cigarette. “I have to finish painting my toenails before I put on my tux.”
* * *
• • •
For much of 2015 and 2016, while everyone I knew was incredulous at the notion that Donald Trump thought he could be president, I was in my office, on the thirty-eighth floor of the World Trade Center, reading such blog posts as “Global Elite’s Secret Plan Revealed” and “The Rational Racist” and “Misogyny Gets You Laid.” Whenever a colleague walked in and saw what was on my screen, I scrambled to say several things that should have gone without saying. I was not reading up on the merits of bigotry because I was open to being convinced. I was not scouring the internet rumor mill for titillation, or to scratch a contrarian itch. Something was happening, and I was trying to figure out what it was.
My colleagues and friends urged me to move on. Don’t feed the trolls, they said, not even with your attention. Just ignore them and eventually they’ll slink away. They have to. Their ideas are simply too odious, their affect too intolerable. In the long run, there’s no way they can win. As Hillary Clinton often said, referring to the most unsavory elements of Trumpism: “This is not who we are.”
Who were we? The campaign went on and on. Every week, the Sunday talk shows were given over to the same set of questions. These sounded like the usual noises of political punditry—predictions about district maps and ground games—but they were proxies for more foundational questions about human nature and the long arc of history. At a dinner party, someone might mention a bit of news about voter ID laws in Wisconsin; two beers later, everyone would be enmeshed in a deeper, more desperate conversation about the intrinsic goodness* or badness* of the American people.
At first, I accepted the Brooklyn dinner-party consensus: it was inconceivable that Trump could win. Shortly after he descended on a gold-colored escalator, referred to Mexicans as “rapists,” and announced that he was running for president, my wife heard from an Ecuadorian friend who had seen the news and was distraught: if this is how he talks now, what if he actually takes office? We informed her, with confident forbearance, that a Trump presidency was not within the realm of possibility. I was keen to keep believing this, and so, for a little while, I did. And yet a part of me couldn’t help remembering a sentence I’d read on The Right Stuff: “The culture war is being fought daily from your smartphone.” Would a bumbling demagogue actually win the presidency? I had a hard time imagining it. Could he win? That was a different question.
Pretty soon, whenever the topic came up, I started appointing myself devil’s advocate. If someone argued that our national character was fundamentally munificent and enlightened, that we couldn’t possibly fall for raw bigotry and chintzy propaganda, I would reply: Yes, we can. A small part of me was just trolling. A bigger part of me was stating the obvious, or what would have been obvious if we weren’t so invested in thinking it unthinkable. Anything can happen. America was having a kind of national conversation, but too often it was reduced to a binary debate: optimistic determinism or pessimistic fatalism. What if that debate was a dead end? What if fate had nothing to do with it?
On a relatively slow day in the early weeks of 2016, I went out for lunch with a journalist I admired, a gatekeeper within our industry. Ribs, corn bread, iced tea, chocolate-chip brownies: the Atkins-era equivalent of three-martini decadence. By then, I was worried. “He really might win,” I said.
The journalist didn’t do a spit take, but that was the gist. He definitely laughed. “Come on,” he said. “You don’t mean that.”
“What’s stopping him?” I insisted. Trump was intolerable in a hundred different ways; but tolerance is a social norm, not a law of nature, and social norms can and do change.
I continued tracking the luridly ugly edges of the internet. The stuff kept proliferating, and it seemed to me that it could have a greater impact than most of us wanted to admit. I was in eighth grade in 1998, when a disreputable blogger named Matt Drudge helped break the story that would lead to the president’s impeachment. After 9/11, the internet swelled with alternative facts to explain the inexplicable, and “truth” came into wide use as an Orwellian synonym for its opposite. Then, during college, came social media, and with it the swift flattening of all information and opinion. In the open marketplace of ideas, what was to stop a lie from outcompeting a fact? Why couldn’t nihilist trolls and misogynist snake-oil salesmen accumulate real power?*
Part of me felt that it was alarmist, almost demeaning, to spend too much time panicking about the rising tide of ugliness online. Another part of me felt that it would have been irresponsible to ignore it. The task of journalism—or a task of a certain kind of journalism—is to look squarely and honestly at the world while also projecting a calm air of decency and dispassion. With each passing week, those two ideals were coming to seem more and more irreconcilable.
“Look, we happen to live in a free country,” one of my colleagues said. “People can click on terrible links if that’s how they want to spend their time.”
This was true, of course. And yet I made counterarguments, trying to convince both my colleague and myself. “Those terrible links influence what people think, how people behave, who people vote for,” I said.
“Is anyone surprised that there’s awful stuff on the internet?” my colleague said.
“Everything is the internet now,” I said, “and the awful stuff might be winning.” I couldn’t guarantee that the ugliness would prevail, of course. On the other hand, I couldn’t guarantee that it would not, and neither could anyone else.
* * *
• • •
After Trump won, the late professor Richard Rorty enjoyed a posthumous moment of mini-virality. My Facebook feed was full of people posting an eerily prescient excerpt from Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, a collection of political lectures published in 1998. With the left wing of the Democratic Party in decline, Rorty argued, the only politicians “channeling the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed” were right-wing populists. If this continued, he wrote, then, sooner or later,
something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for. . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. . . . All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.
