The Quiet Before, page 22
He was earnest about this, believing he could fix all that had gone wrong with Facebook, exploit that knowledge in the creation of a better design. But it never really took off. In the internet ecosystem of the late 2010s, any new form of social media faced a problem known as the network effect: the bigger a network was, the more benefits to joining it, and nothing could come close to Facebook by that point. In 2016, Parlio was acquired by Quora, a site specializing in Q& As in which experts answered questions generated by users. Ghonim and his team were folded into the bigger company’s operations. He soon fell into a depression, and when, in the summer of 2017, he found himself crying in a meeting room at the Quora offices, he decided it was time to quit.
What happened to Wael Ghonim after that was fodder for much rumor and concern when I began asking former Egyptian revolutionaries about him in 2019. They told me to look at his YouTube channel and Twitter. That’s where I found the troubling videos. In the first of what would be dozens of increasingly bizarre clips posted every day, he shaved off all his hair and eyebrows. Then he began to appear shirtless, smoking thickly rolled blunts. He confessed that he had cheated on his wife and brought her on camera to tell his audience that she had asked for a divorce. Sometimes he would post videos of himself laughing maniacally or dancing. His friends and comrades said they tried to get in touch, worried that he was having a nervous breakdown. He cut them all off, even people he had been close to for years.
Everyone had theories. Maybe it had to do with his brother, who had just been detained in Egypt? Ghonim understood the effect he was having: half of his posts mocked those who were shocked. This was his true self, he screamed. When I reached out to him to see if we could speak (I’d interviewed him a number of times over the past few years), he left me a paranoid, badgering voice message, questioning my motives and wondering why he should talk to me. “Do you think I’m an attention whore, like the attention whores who are always driving for any kind of attention?” The saddest interpretation came from one former friend who believed Ghonim was actually manipulating his knowledge of social media in order to annihilate his previous image—he no longer wanted to be seen as a savior, someone who might have answers, about the future of Egypt or Silicon Valley. The videos were a kind of willed reboot. “This is not spontaneous,” this friend told me. “When you work in the business, you fully understand when someone is using it.” Maybe the most self-aware message was Ghonim’s bio on Twitter, where he now had nearly three million followers: “I’m a character in my movie. It’s a reality show that turned surreal.”
As for Egypt, its reality, too, has turned surreal, or rather, nightmarish. Sisi’s rule has proved repressive in ways no one could have imagined before the revolution. Even the slightest attempt at protest has been brutally suppressed. The few online outlets trying to cover the crackdowns and imprisonments are blocked in Egypt. The handful of activists who remain are embattled, devoid of hope, and not looking to social media for solutions.
Alaa Abd El Fattah, a computer programmer, leftist, and early blogger who is widely considered the most creative and tactical thinker of the revolution, has spent most of the past ten years in and out of prison. His physical state, whether he is on a hunger strike or recovering from having been beaten by his guards, is a constant preoccupation of the small band of dissidents and those outside the country still paying attention. His long curly hair and scruffy beard are now something of a symbol of continued resistance.
When Alaa was briefly released from prison in the spring of 2019, a video circulated online of him sitting on the floor against some pillows, chatting with an interviewer. The conversation turned to Facebook, which seemed a progressively stranger place to him every time he went back online after the forced absences. For those who still wanted to dream up a new politics, there had been “a regression,” he said. “It’s not the fault of Egyptians; it’s the medium they are using. You’re just swallowed up by Facebook. You have emotional discussions with your friends, because Facebook is made for that. This is a trap.” He would be looking to analyze the current situation and instead find himself “in these circles of people sending GIFs and heart emojis.” The platform was “stifling,” Alaa said, yet people couldn’t get off it, even now that they knew how “defective” it was. To break through the oppressive reality in Egypt, what was needed was a path toward “an alternate imagination,” a space for theorizing, for allowing in complexity, for working toward action. “I don’t know where or when it will emerge.”
Chapter 8
THE TORCHES
Charlottesville, 2017
ON MAY 13, 2017, a small platoon of white supremacists—newly rebranded as the alt-right—shuffled around beneath a noonday sun. An outsider might have mistaken the three dozen men, mostly in their twenties and thirties and sweating through white polo shirts, for a gathering of golf caddies. They looked awkward, unaccustomed to so much light and so much company, as they began self-seriously marching to the beat of a snare drum on their way to the bronze foot of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. There they listened, enraptured, as Richard Spencer, their unofficial leader, explained through a bullhorn why they would make their stand in this place, Charlottesville, Virginia. Spencer looked, as always, well manicured, in a tan blazer, his hair in a Hitler Youth cut (sides shaved, top slicked back). “They are trying to take away our gods,” he yelled. “They are trying to take away our ideals. They are trying to take away who we are. And instead of this monument, God knows what they are going to erect, some monument to death, some monument to slavery and the Holocaust, some monument to the black cloud that hangs over everybody’s head.” He offered a succinct summary of their cause: “What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced.”
If this was all they could have publicly mustered that weekend, it would have seemed something less than frightening; pathetic, even. But what happened that same night sent tremors across the country. A group of about a hundred, larger than the afternoon crowd, paraded with blazing tiki torches to the statue of Robert E. Lee, one of the city’s other tributes to its rebel past, loudly chanting, “You will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!” (and, most bizarrely, “Russia is our friend!”). It didn’t last very long—only about ten minutes before counterprotesters and then the police arrived—but the procession was captured through the fly’s-eye perspective of a drone and shared again and again on social media and in the mainstream press. The torchlit faces, the spewed-out slogans, the shadows that elongated their shaved heads against the night—all of it brought to mind Nazi rallies, Klan meetings, open expressions of hate that most Americans thought existed only at the bottom of the ash heap of history. It’s safe to assume this was the desired effect.
It was a success, in other words, and one the bigots badly needed. Spencer had spent years starting and running increasingly right-wing publications, including AlternativeRight.com, which he set up in 2010. He also headed a think tank called the National Policy Institute with a media savviness rare in a neo-Nazi. Spencer had felt emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, a man whose winking at racist and nativist forces had become something of a tic. This was the moment to announce the alt-right as a movement that no longer needed to cower in basements or on online message boards. But piggybacking on Trump’s ascent had not been as easy as Spencer had imagined. Just a few months earlier, on the very day of Trump’s inauguration, Spencer was being interviewed on a busy street corner in Washington, D.C., when a man in a black hood suddenly slammed a fist into his face, knocking Spencer to the ground. It was humiliating.
Before Trump, the alt-right had very little political influence. Limited to bottom-feeder social media sites like 4chan, the movement was a mismatched collection of white supremacists and self-proclaimed identitarians, and a bunch of bored and sexually frustrated young men, all pretty much anonymous. It was less a community than a paintball team. To the extent that there was any ideological common denominator, it was in their denigration of the “social justice warriors” of the Left, the progressive forces that were imposing their multicultural and gender-fluid values on everyone. What thrilled them about Trump’s win, more than his populism or protectionism or even his embrace of white identity politics (the “forgotten men and women” he spoke to in his inaugural address), was his style, which seemed to borrow so much from their “own the libs” attitude. The objective was to get under the skin, to drive the “other side” crazy, and Trump did.
Given the hyper-masculinity that coursed through the online threads, seeing Spencer, one of their heroes, brought so low in the early hours of the Trump presidency was especially confusing. They were the rightmost flank of Trump’s coalition, the makers of the memes, and this was supposed to be their time. Who were they if they couldn’t even show their faces?
A few months later, in April, they finally got some satisfaction, and confirmation that being audacious was the only way to go. In Berkeley, enemy territory for the alt-right, a number of so-called white civil rights groups had organized a free speech rally that pretty quickly turned into a violent mess of thrown rocks and bottles and firecrackers. Antifascist counterprotesters had shown up, and it had become ugly, sloppy. At one point a large trash bin was used as a battering ram. But remembered most from the melee was a few seconds of video in which Nathan Damigo, the head of Identity Evropa, one of the many new alt-right groups, leaped into a crowd of brawling bodies and slammed his fist into the face of a dreadlocked activist named Emily Rose Marshall. The clip was uploaded endlessly on message boards, turned into a thousand memes: Damigo, with that same Hitler Youth haircut, dressed crisply in blue shirt and blue jeans, attacking Marshall, who looked like any right-winger’s fantasy of a social justice warrior. The Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website, called Damigo a “true hero.”
The members of Identity Evropa were unabashed, but also determined to use a vocabulary that would not alienate. Damigo himself was an ex-marine who had started his campaign while a student at California State University, Stanislaus. He wanted it to copy the nationalist movements then gaining traction in Europe. No white robes. No tattoos on faces, necks, or hands. Articles about Damigo always noted that instead of swearing, he used words like “gosh” or “golly.” And his rhetoric centered on white people being denied the right to preserve their “heritage,” appropriating the language that minorities had been using to make their own case for representation. “We don’t want to be seen as overly threatening,” Damigo told a reporter on the same day he’d punched the dreadlocked young woman.
An event like Berkeley was “transformative,” wrote Bradley Dean Griffin, a prominent white nationalist who had been sharing his anti-Semitic and racist views on his blog, Occidental Dissent, since 2008. It created a spectacle that would draw in more recruits and redefine the image of white supremacists. It may be “fun to engage in troll storms, swarms and raids online,” he wrote, but to grow, the movement needed to step outside. It was the only way, he insisted, to “summon the culture war that is going on online” and bring it to the surface, to make it “explode like a volcano.”
By the spring, Charlottesville presented itself as the perfect such opportunity: geographically in the borderlands of American politics but a decidedly liberal college town (in the volatile days after Trump’s inauguration, the mayor declared it a “capital of the Resistance,” and nearly 80 percent of voters had gone for Hillary Clinton). It was a city that during the Civil War had a population of slaves that made up 52 percent of its residents and where the bronze statue of Robert E. Lee, sitting on his horse, Traveller, had dominated a small park in its downtown since 1924. It was a place primed for a fight. In early February, when the city council voted to remove the Lee statue, Spencer saw the galvanizing issue that he was seeking: a chance to tell a story about a reactionary, nihilistic Left looking to trample on their past, to erase their tradition.
The events in mid-May helped remove the memory of that sucker punch. Spencer posted a photo on Twitter of his face aglow in the light of a tiki torch. But he wanted more. He wanted to return to Charlottesville and show the full power of a newly emboldened movement. He would need Jason Kessler. The torchlit rally had happened largely because of Kessler, a self-styled independent journalist and blogger from Charlottesville who, like Spencer, was a graduate of the University of Virginia. Kessler’s path had been a bit meandering; a sometime truck driver and handyman, he had only recently begun expounding on the threat of “white genocide.” (Among other things he had written a book of poetry and a novel called Badland Blues, which, according to its jacket, featured “a homeless dwarf madly in unrequited love with a local waitress.”) He took to the statue battle. “Every generation has a fight, and our fight is this,” he had yelled outside the city council meeting deciding the monument’s fate. It was his newly formed group, Unity & Security for America, along with some of Damigo’s people, who had made up much of the crowd. And after the success of the May rally, it was Kessler who filed an application for a permit to hold a demonstration that summer, on August 12, at the small park where the Lee statue was located (its name would soon be changed from Lee Park to Emancipation Park). He called the event “Unite the Right” on social media, a bit of wishful thinking on his part because there was nothing particularly united about the Right’s various strands.
It was a start, but both Kessler and Spencer knew they needed many more allies. And to assemble them, to do the hard work of aligning and getting a large enough group of people to agree on tactics and objectives, they required a space of their own, one with particular features. Sites like Reddit and 4chan, so popular with the alt-right, were too full of snark and towel snapping, just memes trying to outdo memes. So, in June, they turned to Discord, an online platform meant for gamers, and opened up what was known on the site as a “server,” a self-administered chat room. They called it Charlottesville 2.0.
* * *
—
I KNOW WHAT happened next, thanks to a group of leftist hackers who run a website called Unicorn Riot. They managed that summer to gain access to the constellation of white supremacist servers on Discord—tens of thousands of posts from June through August. This was a chance to eavesdrop on a conversation that was not meant to be public in any way. And for all that was sickening about spending this much time with people whose idea of fun was arguing about whom they would send to the gas chamber first, it was deeply revealing. This is what it looked like when a nascent group had what the Arab Spring activists didn’t have: somewhere to concentrate, to debate their differences and try to work them out. Among themselves, they were able to pat each other on the back and dream their twisted dreams together, and they got stronger.
Discord was a useful platform for them, but it was never intended to house their chatter. It was made for teenage boys who sat playing World of Warcraft late into the night and wanted to simultaneously gab with their friends as they slayed zombies and dragons. Its most popular function was the server, which was an invitation-only chat room (there was also a party line audio option). Each server had its own administrator who set the rules, could kick people out, and was responsible for keeping the members in line. Unlike Reddit, there was no upvoting to incentivize attention-grabbing posts, turning every exchange into a popularity contest or a purity spiral. It was just ongoing talk in a relatively small room on terms set by the participants. It resembled the WELL more than any other major social media platform. This was about huddling together as opposed to gaining followers.
The alt-right leaders liked the anonymity and privacy—though given the ease with which Unicorn Riot infiltrated their chats, they might have benefited from a little more paranoia. Among other secrecy benefits, you could run Discord straight off a web browser without downloading an application and never have to give your real name. By that summer of 2017, two years after it had started up, the site had about 45 million users and was increasing by 1.1 million every week. Discord’s Jewish co-founder and CEO would later say he had been clueless about what a home for hate his site had become.
Keegan Hankes, the former research director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the premier organization monitoring extremism in America, also spent a lot of time on Discord that summer. He told me how administrators of various alt-right servers would vet people before letting them in: they would video chat to make sure they saw white skin. Hankes once let a fellow researcher “borrow” his face for this purpose. What made Discord useful, Hankes said, was that each particular faction had its own server, which became a sort of “base camp” for them. They could strengthen identity in a more local way, each group building up its private convictions, but also check out what others were thinking and possibly join with them.
The Charlottesville 2.0 server, which I spent a couple of dark weeks combing through, was the main organizing hub. Spencer remained a figurehead, but in the server it was Kessler, going by the handle MadDimension, who seemed most in charge and was trying to keep the conversation centered on how to enlarge their base. “Please stop the fighting. I’m trying to work out security plans for our speakers and it’s embarrassing to be bringing professionals in here while people are bickering,” was a typical post.
Among the pool of disgruntled provocateurs who felt white men were America’s true victims, there were still wide ideological gulfs. The Jewish Question, or JQ, was one. For some, Jews were the secret source of the diversity that was supposedly choking the country, the ones who had opened the gates and were controlling the narrative. Solving this particular problem was a central preoccupation of those who were “Hip to the JQ”: KommieKillinKowboy suggested “a google maps plug in that would mark kike owned businesses with a star of david so white nationalists could avoid them.” Some championed the idea of ethno-states, even Israel (where all Jews could supposedly be shipped). The crematorium, of course, was also popular.
