The Quiet Before, page 23
Then there were individuals and groups who shared the general spirit of antifeminist, anti-globalist, anti–political correctness, but wanted to stay as far away as possible from the Hitler birthday parties and Sieg heils. This was the alt-light. They were slightly to the left of Damigo and his identitarians and certainly nowhere near the Klan or the more blatantly neo-Nazi groups like the Atomwaffen Division with its belief in accelerationism, the active fomenting of a cataclysmic race war. The alt-light’s online universe of grievance included the manosphere, where men’s rights were defended against the tyranny of a feminized culture. Groups like the Proud Boys, led by the hipstery co-founder of VICE Media, Gavin McInnes, led a “pro-Western” and “pro-male” fight club, hiding their racism and misogyny behind nostalgia for a world where boys could just be boys. There was a lot of time spent dissecting this difference between the alt-right and the alt-light—Greg Johnson, a prominent white supremacist thinker, described it this way: “The alt-light is defined by civic nationalism as opposed to racial nationalism.”
Whatever the definition, getting Gavin McInnes and his enlightened frat boys in the same room as followers of the KKK grand wizard David Duke would not be simple. But it’s the task Kessler and Spencer had set for themselves, and if there was any place to plan these marriages of convenience, to figure out how they would work, to court and lobby, it would be on Discord. If they wanted to go bigger, this would offer the best space to make it happen. As ManWithTheHand noted not long after the Charlottesville 2.0 server was set up, unlike the earlier spontaneous protest, this time they were giving themselves time to gather their forces: “Lightning represents our first event, quick, fast, and all of a sudden. This second event is the thunder, they will hear us rolling in, we will be loud and fearful, and they will know it’s coming because thunder always follows lightning.”
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ALMOST AS SOON AS the server was created, one of the most popular topics, returned to nearly every day, was “optics.” This was shorthand for thinking through exactly how their protest might appear to the mainstream. For most of the alt-right groups, like Damigo’s Identity Evropa, their entire reason for being was that they envisioned a way to advocate for their ultimate goal—a white, Christian America—without alarming the people who they imagined were their natural constituency. They saw no benefit in outdated symbols, like swastikas, or showing up heavily armed or wearing hoods. At the same time, they didn’t want to turn away those who already supported their ideas but were not quite ready to put on suits and ties.
This negotiation was what they meant by “optics.” The endless banter about how best to present themselves (“Thoughts on these shoes?” “Are we gonna do armbands?” “White shirts with army green pants or army green shirts with black pants?”) landed on the blandest of the bland: white shirts and khakis. This seems trivial, but it also represented the first of several small victories enabled by the platform. What else but white shirts and khakis could occupy the overlapping center of the Venn diagram? What everyone agreed upon is that they should look like nice young men. Not only would this make their movement more accessible and respectable, but it would signal their commonality of purpose. “Optics are very important,” wrote bainbjorn. “If everyone shows up with their own versions of things we look disorganized and like common rabble. If everyone wears a white shirt and khakis and our security has the exact same shield and helmets then we look legitimate. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. We have to have uniformity in everything we do if we are serious, no rogues no lone wolfs no individJEWals.”
The other concern was over what they should carry. “I like the aesthetic of shields, in general,” wrote Kurt14Lipper. “Optics saying that we are about defense. All of this is in our own defense. Until we’re pushed too far.” They wanted to do torches again. But then which ones and would they be a fire hazard? “If we’re doing real torches, which we should, we gotta be very safety conscious,” wrote HipToTheJQ. “I do think for aesthetic purposes, if we do torches again, they need to be actual torches,” wrote Erika, an Identity Evropa activist from Florida who was also Charlottesville 2.0’s moderator and one of its handful of women members. “The only reservation I have against walking around with fire on sticks this time is that we’ll have potentially very violent opposition waiting for us. I really don’t want our people getting burned if a brawl breaks out while we’re marching with torches.” Kristall.night asked, “Is there a cleaner burning oil that can be used in the torches instead of the tiki crap?” Someone suggested citronella.
It was hard not to find these palavers at least slightly amusing. They had none of the swagger associated with the public-facing side of the alt-right, the trolling on Twitter, where vicious, scary things were said and then covered up with a sneering attitude of “just kidding” or “why are you getting so upset?” There was plenty of taunting and teasing on Discord, and the occasional pile on, but there was also sincerity among the “fam,” as they often referred to each other. I read one conversation in which the group consoled one of their own, Hand Banana, with genuine locker room affection after he admitted that a woman he went on a date with turned out to be half-Jewish—“Second Jew this year for me. Sad!” “We need to both feel bad for you and simultaneously give you a hard time for it,” wrote Tyrone. There was not much showing off. Even if they didn’t agree about certain strategies, they were among their own people, those who had already been “red pilled,” alt-right lingo for having been converted to the cause. They would be horrified by the term, but this was a “safe space” for them. In one of the few audio chats that Unicorn Riot had managed to access, the leaders of three hard-core white supremacist groups talked about the joys of baking sourdough bread.
But there were real debates about the finer points: swastikas, for example. When one of the members in the server complained about not being able to wear Nazi paraphernalia, a discussion broke out about why they needed to keep it hidden. “Because telling a 85 IQ boomer they shouldn’t want to live in a country full of muslims and violent mexican gang members is relatable and agreeable whereas slapping a swastika on and worshipping a dead german politician isn’t,” wrote one participant in the server who went by the handle Wyatt and took up the “optics will always matter” side of the debate. Challenged by a few members (as one put it, “Hitler and the Swastika are awesome”), Wyatt made clear he had no problem “using 3rd reich nostalgia in the culture war and breaking down welded shut doors of cultural taboo,” but that this was no way, he wrote, “to win any hearts and minds.” The goal of their coming together was not to start a political party or raise an army; they had a much more limited but strategically important objective: “getting a majority of white people on board with white identity itself.” To this, Stormer DC added, “You’re not gonna be able to secure a future for white children if you are unwilling to go through the pain of destroying the Nazi stigma.”
Most of the server backed this position, but the conversation opened out into a wider argument: swastikas and the blatant Nazism they represent as being a more authentic and braver way to “shock the system,” as one member put it, versus an incrementalism that Wyatt and others were championing (“you guys think it’s going to be some massive revolution. It’s not. Day by day. More and more white people are going to wake up. And soon within the next 5–10 years there will be enough to initiate a massive shift in culture and politics”). They also discussed the failure of white supremacists of the past to make much of an impact, especially when compared with the rapidly increasing visibility of an alt-right group like Identity Evropa. “I didn’t want to say this because it’s rude but in A YEAR Identity Evropa eclipsed every white nationalist movement in the past 50 years,” Wyatt wrote. “They succeed because of how they look. How they act. and how they CARE about how they look and act.” As the back-and-forth got more contentious, there was also a reminder, by one member, that this particular protest was about the Lee statue, that this was their unifying issue. “I think we all agree that the removal of that statue is an affront to all of us….Let’s keep it about that,” wrote SpencerReesh. The debates often worked toward this search for commonality. “Many of us are National Socialists, on both sides of this disagreement,” wrote Gavius Corvus in a kind of summation. “We want the same thing, it’s just a differing on the best course of action to get there. Like Wyatt said, it’s good that we can have these discussions. In the past, our movement has let itself be torn apart by these relatively petty disagreements. I think it’s a fantastic sign that we can have these disagreements now, and still stand together when it counts.”
Optics was clearly more than just a matter of aesthetics. It was a conversation about building a larger base. What were their priorities? Which principles were essential and which could be discarded? Another argument broke out at one point when Jason Kessler asked for any volunteers who wanted to burn the Pride flag, the rainbow emblem of the LGBTQ movement. He immediately got pushback from a few members who thought this wouldn’t be a good look. But most surprising was the response from Erika, the server’s moderator. “Gays are a small minority,” she wrote. “Burn a communist or anarchist flag.” Kessler tried to clarify: “It’s not about gays. I don’t care about gays. That damn flag has become the de-facto symbol for Cultural Marxism,” by which he meant an emblem “of Silicon Valley, of the Democrat Party, of our ethnic and cultural replacement….It is a multiculturalism flag at this point.” Erika tagged Kessler in her response using his handle. “@MadDimension it’s not about what you and all of us see. It’s about how the rest of the world will perceive it,” she wrote. “People will exclude whatever speech you make before burning the flag, and it’ll just be ‘NAZIS WANT TO GENOCIDE FAGS.’ ” Kessler insisted that the flag had greater significance than just being about gay pride, that it signaled to white people another set of values than their own: “I think the greatest strength of the Right wing is that we convey truths and secret emotions that people suppress because of social stigma. I think the heartland of America is sick and tired of that fucking flag.” Erika kept repeating that it didn’t matter what he thought it symbolized. To most of the world, it simply meant gay pride. Burning it would be a distraction, and they needed to focus. “Burning a fag flag is a terrible idea,” Jack “Ajax” Richardson chimed in. “We have a winning combo of good optics, clean appearance, intelligent and level reasoning, and civilized manner. Flag burning goes against all of that. We can’t try to change our formula mid-stream.” Kessler ended up quietly backing down, and Erika didn’t make an issue of his retreat. “Please have some patience guys,” Kessler wrote. “You can talk about flag burning or whatever you want and no one has a right to tell you that you can’t. This should be a place where people can openly debate ideas.”
These moments of friction almost always resolved themselves. To Athena Marie’s question, “Why can’t we organize a book burning after the event?” Stormer DC wisely responded, “Because it will accomplish nothing other than making us look like we’re scared of literature.” The tension was often broken by vile jokes or the sharing of stupid and racist memes. “I just think that a more subtle hand is required to make people see the light,” wrote Soy Goy.
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AS THE WEEKS progressed and the chatter on Charlottesville 2.0 grew (by the time Unicorn Riot downloaded the whole server in August, there were more than twenty-one thousand posts), Kessler began sharing information about logistics—who would be speaking at their rally and what other groups they were trying to pull in. Finding a way to integrate Gavin McInnes’s Proud Boys was a major topic.
From the server’s start, Erika had policed who could and couldn’t join and made it clear that at least for the moment she and the others were keeping it exclusively alt-right, if only for security reasons. But Kessler was eager to expand. At one point he proposed inviting a local group of Proud Boys for a drink in a downtown Charlottesville bar. He figured it was likely that antifa, the black-clad antifascist activists, would attack them and that the experience would move the Proud Boys further into his camp. Kessler shared the plan on the server. “I understand the goal,” wrote AltRightVa. “Get PB out there to fully understand that no matter how they try to distinguish themselves from us they will be grouped in with us and may as well join us. It makes sense.” But others thought this was deceptive and could alienate the potential recruits. “There has to be trust between the different organizations if this thing has any chance,” countered atthias. Kessler went ahead anyway; as he had predicted, there was a scuffle, and they were all kicked out of the bar. “The guys who came with us are jacked for August 12th,” he then reported back.
Getting old Klan members to join simply meant cleaning up Grandpa and persuading him to keep his swastikas in the closet. The alt-light, and Proud Boys in particular, were a more complicated matter, forcing the members of the server to decide how loose they were willing to get with their own ideological commitments. Some Proud Boys were not even white. They had a much more glib and slippery attitude about what they believed. But they were also undeniably potential bridges to the mainstream. “The biggest difference between the right and left right now is that the right refuses to work with ‘ideologically impure’ groups while the left adopts a big tent strategy much to their advantage,” wrote Hand Banana. Kessler kept pushing everyone to be open. (He even subjected himself to a Proud Boys initiation ritual: three stages, the second of which involved sustaining a beating while calling out the names of breakfast cereals.) But there was resistance and suspicion as the list of participants got longer. “I never said I wasn’t willing to work with ppl that are not 100% in step with us,” argued ManWithTheHand. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t absorb alt light ppl. But the main issue is we are making all the compromises here. Why do we have to throw everything we stand for aside while dealing with ‘Ideologically Impure’ groups? They need to meet us at the very LEAST halfway. And I don’t think asking alt light ppl to endorse white nationalism is too much to ask for.”
The antagonism between the alt-right and the alt-light became public on June 25, when Richard Spencer and Nathan Damigo put on a “Rally for Free Speech” near the Lincoln Memorial. It included a number of figures who had spoken in Charlottesville the month before, waving the banners of Identity Evropa and another new group called Vanguard America. On the same day, a rival demonstration “against political violence” was taking place near the White House, organized by figures in the alt-light, including Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, two rabid conspiracy theorists. Posobiec was supposed to appear at the alt-right event but changed his mind when he learned Spencer would also be speaking. Both rallies were pretty sparsely attended, no more than a hundred people, but the dividing line was evident. It had mostly to do with how brazenly anti-Semitic they were willing to be. At the “free speech” rally, Kessler spoke about nefarious Jewish influence, directing himself at the cameras. “All you guys out here tell me who is in charge of the global conglomerates that own you, that own CBS and NBC?” At the other gathering the speakers were more concerned with pointing out the ways liberals and Democrats were evil incarnate.
For the members of the server, who analyzed the dueling demonstrations for the lessons they might draw for their own planned event, it was an illustration of just how hard “uniting the Right” would be. But they also noticed that Proud Boys appeared at both rallies, which only reinforced the sense that they would be the easiest recruits. One Proud Boys member, Kyle Chapman, who had taken to referring to himself as “Based Stickman” after he hit a counterprotester in the head with a stick at a pro-Trump rally in Berkeley, had started a paramilitary offshoot of the group called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights. “I am not afraid to speak out about the atrocities that whites and people of European descent face not only here in this country,” Chapman told a crowd in July at something called the Unite America First Peace Rally in Sacramento. Even Gavin McInnes, after initially waffling, ended up encouraging those who felt “compelled” to go to Charlottesville. All of this information was churned over in the server. “I don’t like Gavin or chopstick man, either, but many of the young white men who listen to Gavin and chopstick man right now will no doubt see the flaws in their logic and will be on our side by the end of the year,” Erika wrote. “We should be open to having them at our events.”
If they were wary about including people who showed some hesitancy on the Jewish Question, they were also guarding against being sucked toward the most violent end of the extreme Right. Kessler set the list of speakers, and it included plenty of openly anti-Semitic characters like Mike Enoch, who co-hosted one of the most popular alt-right podcasts, The Daily Shoah, which regularly and joyfully mocked Jewish suffering. He created the anti-Semitic (((echo))) meme, based on the reverb sound effect he used whenever mentioning Jewish people on his show. Members of the alt-right began to affix three sets of parentheses around names to indicate Jewish influence—most commonly on social media. (In January 2017, Enoch also infamously confessed that his wife was Jewish, an absolute scandal in the alt-right universe that almost got him ostracized for life.)
Despite giving a platform to Enoch, Kessler drew the line at including anyone from the Daily Stormer, the biggest neo-Nazi site on the internet. It was run by Andrew Anglin, the godfather of the alt-right, who was the first to start thinking about how to make racism and anti-Semitism modern and tech savvy. Anglin himself was pretty much in hiding, but one of his collaborators, Robert Warren Ray, better known by his nom de guerre, Azzmador, was one of the site’s writers and podcast hosts. Azzmador, out of East Texas, was bearded, beer-bellied, and older than most of the alt-right. This was not great optics. When it got out that the organizers had denied him a speaking spot, there was some pushback on the server over why exactly Azzmador should be seen as untouchable. WhiteTrash wrote, “Azzmador should be speaking…someone needs to represent the most popular alt right site.” Tyrone broadened the sentiment: “Everyone from Aryan Nation clover tatted felons or recovering degenerates to Proud Boys has a place. They are tools in the tool box.” But this was another instance where the server became useful for smoothing things over. Kessler explained himself and started to win support from others who thought Azzmador might not be best at helping them gain wider acceptance. As HouseboatMedic put it, “As much as I fucking love Azzmador, not many normies are going to be swayed by an angry old bearded guy screaming at kikes that he’s going to kick them into an oven.”
