The Quiet Before, page 24
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WE THINK ABOUT the dark corners of the internet as places of danger and radicalization, where the absence of shame allows terrible notions to fester. And it’s true. But there is another way of conceiving of what happens when a self-selecting group retreats to a quieter, slower, more private, and less performative space to have conversation: it breeds imagination. What I saw on the Discord servers from that summer reminded me of the Futurist manifestos, the relay of each man’s maniacal aspirations for society providing a slap on the back for another man to take it further, to propose something even more bombastic. In this way, they all came to believe something impossible was actually possible: that their ideas could find a place in the sun.
The platform they used was already built around the fantasizing of gamers. Their dreams of eliminating Jews, of massacring Black people, took place next to other sorts of playacting, some the benign fun of a Dungeons & Dragons session and others that involved killing and maiming dozens of people at a time. Megan Condis, a professor at Texas Tech University who has studied Discord and masculinity, told me how being disembodied online, without any obvious markers of identity like gender or skin color, could yield a kind of creativity, using words alone to prove one’s manliness, one’s whiteness, one’s commitment to a common goal, all to an exaggerated degree. “Everything has to be built from scratch,” she said.
I saw servers where members spent most of their time designing together the flag that would represent their group, essentially building an avatar. They would make suggestions about colors and symbols, critiquing one another’s drafts, bringing up examples of flags from the past to emulate. “I think if you are trying to make a flag that represents a Nation, you should copy the Northern European design and just make a simple tricolor,” wrote blackhat 16 about one idea. “If you’re trying to make a flag for a patriotic fascist organization within the Nation, you should add the symbolism and be more liberal with color placement.” Commenting on another design, Australopithecus Jordan wrote, “The black sun in the top corner is appealing. It’s subtle but attractive to our kin specifically.” They would go on and on like this for hours, often late into the night, ostensibly workshopping but really reinforcing their dreaming in the same direction (“I really value your guys’ feedback and hope we can find a…‘final’ solution,” wrote Wehrmacht).
Of course this dreaming was often less innocuous than the color scheme on a flag. One conversation centered on the question of how to create geographic enclaves for nonwhite people. “There may be the necessity of a restructuring of national borders for new nations to come to sovereignty,” wrote AltRightVa. From this post spun out a series of proposals. He suggested carving out an area of Mississippi: “Make it a black nation and incentivize the exodus by giving all blacks who would want to move there some money and a dwelling. We could clear out Baltimore mostly through voluntary migration.” Others warmed to this thought exercise. “If all went to plan and you were going to designate an area of the country for a black state, which area would it be?” 80D asked. “I say something like North Dakota but idk there’s actually a lot of beauty there.”
They spent a lot of time preoccupied with the role of women in their future all-white America. What began as a recurring concern about whether women should be allowed at “Unite the Right” veered into a more general sifting through of their values. Unsurprisingly, the consensus was that women should be in a “supportive role,” as one member put it, doing the cooking and cleaning and childbearing. They were fairly explicit about this: women in the movement should be “forming the sewing circles,” Johnny McFashy wrote. There was even a sick joke about “white sharia,” the notion that they would be better off if they implemented traditional Muslim laws regarding women (“We respect women, only if they don’t act like total degenerate sluts, are traditional, are with a man, and respects the will of said man, and is fertile, and is also not going out without her male partner because this is WHITE SHARIA motherfuckers!”).
On the Charlottesville 2.0 server there was some tension around this fantasy of male domination precisely because of who their moderator was. Erika, who had the power to kick members out, showed herself unafraid to object when degrading comments were made about women. The men often didn’t know what to make of her. They tried to put her in her place, asserting the rules of the world they hoped to create. This, even though she was the only one with any real authority. Erika was eventually revealed to be Erica Joy Alduino, who in selfies all over social media wore bright red lipstick and had a tattoo in cursive script just beneath her clavicle that read, “I will never be silenced.” She was a central organizer of the rally, working closely with Kessler, who seemed to trust her. Being admin of the server was an important role. She set the limits. “I ban people who don’t respect some basic rules regarding discussion on this server/optics going forward, and who keep escalating things,” she wrote after a member used a derogatory phrase to refer to women. “Kinda like you.” This drove the rest of the server crazy. One member, SchoolShooterRecruiter, summed it up, “A right wing movement should not have a female mod and it’s ridiculous we even have to discuss this.” Erika did have her defenders, though. When members got upset after she reminded them of Kessler’s rule about not carrying guns openly at the event, Goldstein Riots stepped in: “Look, all erika did was point out rules that everyone else already knows, if you don’t like it tough. Jason said no open carry, don’t get your panties in a bunch because a girl pointed that out to you.”
It might seem absurd to read too much into this vile, misogynistic bullying, but they were building and reinforcing shared values through these moments of conflict. The intense imagining was exactly what Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, had been prescribing for a long time. His own website’s message board was also meant for creating a community. Only then, he figured, could they begin to take over the world.
In “A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” an essay he published two months before the 2016 presidential election, Anglin explained the unusual source of his ideas. “Of particular importance to me was the book ‘Rules for Radicals’ by the Jew Saul Alinsky, given that he codified the strategy used by the Jews to tear down the entire ancient body of European traditions and social norms and replace it with something the Jews felt more comfortable with,” Anglin wrote. He wanted to apply the lessons he had learned from Alinsky about the stages of a movement. “The end goal of the Alt-Right is to first solidify a stable and self-sustaining counter-culture, and then eventually push this into becoming the dominant culture, in the same way that the Jewish-led revolutionary counter-culture of the 1960s has now become the dominant culture of the West.” Whether the alt-right had spent enough time quietly steeping in their Discord servers to emerge and challenge the dominant culture was a question about to be answered.
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AS THE WEEKEND of August 12 approached, the server became busy with logistics. (“Can I bring my Rottweiler?” “People better learn Dixie. We’ll look and feel real lame if only like 10 people can make it through the whole song.”) With less than a week to go, Kessler encountered some trouble with his permit for the rally. He was told by the city that a decision had been made to move them from Emancipation Park (the former Lee Park), a small square in the middle of Charlottesville and not easily secured, to McIntire Park, a much larger grassy expanse north of downtown. Kessler resisted, and then on August 10, two days before the demonstration, he filed suit against the city in federal court with the help of the ACLU. “Let the blood of your ancestors boil in your soul. We shall NOT be shoved to the back of the bus. That’s what this is. Being shoved into a corner,” SpencerReesh wrote. “A loosely dispersed crowd looks like a state fair, not a political rally.” There was a lot of frustration and commiseration about what felt like a major setback on the “optics” front—the thing they cared most about. “The whole POINT was to be at the LEE STATUE,” another member wrote.
The day before the rally, Friday, August 11, the court sided with Kessler and the ACLU, ordering the city to allow the original permit (putting the white supremacists in the strange position of praising their “kike lawyers”). After all those weeks of imagining and building themselves up, they were finally going to do it. The server became an emotional place. You could tell how bonded they had become through their conversations because even some vulnerability crept in. “All we have is each other,” Mack Albion wrote. “We need to be reminded of that sometimes.” The night before, another member, junker, admitted, “I’m scared.” But mostly they were pumping each other up. “In all seriousness, circa 2012 I was reading transcripts of Hitler’s speeches thinking that I was the only one pondering a new ‘Eurocentric consciousness,’ ” wrote Beeravon. “Five years later, I am about to lie down to the last sleep before I witness that become a reality with the gathering of hundreds of men all who have it in them to strive for greatness. This shall be overwhelming, and undeniable change is coming our way.”
People who were not sympathetic to the cause, including antifascist activists, were pouring into the city, and businesses like Airbnb were taking a stand against the alt-right’s presence by refusing to serve them. They needed to fortify themselves, and Discord was where they could do it. “If anyone’s feeling shaky or discouraged after reading about the hordes of people coming to protest us, AirBnB’s bullshit, businesses flaking out on us, and the problems with the permit, remember: it’s never easy being the tip of the spear,” wrote AshBrighton—AL. “We are the start of something really big, and our courage will always be remembered when we win.”
On Friday night, after nightfall, they surprised the authorities and the city by repeating what had worked for them so well in May: a torchlit procession. This time they marched through the University of Virginia campus to the school’s statue of Thomas Jefferson. There were many more of them now, hundreds, and they were louder. “You will not replace us!” quickly turned into “Jews will not replace us!” It was the same angry red-faced shouts, the khakis and white polos and Hitler Youth haircuts, the arms raised in a Nazi salute, a line of flames. With the press already in Charlottesville, the image of fire cutting through the night circulated rapidly, displaying their defiance for the world to see. It was the lack of fear or shame that shocked. They seemed liberated. “Guys this looks beautiful,” wrote queenarchitect, one of a few members of the server who was posting in real time. The police largely stayed on the sidelines and did little when a fight broke out with a small group of counterprotesters. A few people got maced, but the biggest harm was psychological. It was the reanimation of an American monster most people wanted to believe had been killed off. It was like a zombie invasion.
The server was quiet the next day. They were living the dream instead of working to bring it about. And things got ugly very quickly. Discord and the torchlit rally had lent them a sensation of strength; they had bolstered and unified them. The alt-right’s favorite metaphor is the Overton window, which represents the range of acceptable political views at any given historical moment. The heat conducted on those servers made them feel as if they could open the window just a crack more if they acted together. It hadn’t, however, changed a few basic realities: most everyone thought their worldview abhorrent and worth opposing, their numbers were still few, and despite their attempts to impose discipline (“Please do not salute during the rally,” Kessler begged that morning), there were more than a few violent, deranged people in their midst. These were the unavoidable truths that converged on the streets of downtown Charlottesville on August 12.
That morning, the alt-right and those they’d managed to bring along with them—from David Duke to the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group—began making their way from their staging ground in McIntire Park to Emancipation Park and the Lee statue, where they now had a permit to hold their event. At the same time a broad coalition of counterprotesters, local ministers and rabbis, and antifascist forces who were ready to rumble (some of them armed with balloons filled with pink paint) were on their way there as well, marching from St. Paul’s Memorial Church. It didn’t take very long before these two contingents clashed and street fighting broke out everywhere, flagpoles turning into makeshift weapons. Many of the white supremacists came dressed as if they were in a video game, as if the helmets and body armor that bulked them up still gave them the same distance from reality they had on Discord. They rushed into crowds swinging their large plastic shields covered in the insignias they had designed together, red crosses against white. It was vicious. And the police stood by, watching as people slammed their bodies into each other. An independent report later commissioned by the city was scathing: “When violence was most prevalent, C.P.D. commanders pulled officers back to a protected area of the park, where they remained for over an hour as people in the large crowd fought on Market Street.” Finally, at 11:28, a state of emergency was declared and then, soon after, “unlawful assembly,” at which point police started making arrests, trying to clear everyone out.
Richard Spencer was struggling to reach the Lee statue when he was maced—first, he said, by counterprotesters and then by the police, who had an order of dispersal. He started livestreaming on Twitter, his face dripping wet and his eyes bloodshot. “This is an absolute outrage,” Spencer said. “This is a peaceful assembly.” Police in full riot gear moved in to push everyone out of the park, and Spencer kept filming—“I’m not moving, sir, I won’t attack you, but I’m not moving”—until he was finally shoved back by riot shields. He tweeted to his followers, “My recommendation: Disperse. Get out of Charlottesville city limits.”
The clashes continued into the early afternoon, when a large group of counterprotesters took to the center of downtown. It was then, around 1:45, that James Alex Fields Jr., who had driven from Ohio to attend the rally and earlier had wielded a Vanguard America shield, plowed his Dodge Challenger into the crowd and then quickly reversed down the narrow street, with bodies horrifically tossed every which way. The attack left dozens of people injured, and then, a few hours later, came the news that one woman had been killed: Heather Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old paralegal.
On the Charlottesville 2.0 server they cycled through denial (“Please just tell me it wasn’t one of our guys”) and anger (“Fucking caused more damage to our movement than 100 antifa”) to resignation (“People, please use your heads. Cut back on the rage for just a second and think about how to articulate a message that stands by our cause without sounding like knuckle-dragging idiots”). Kessler seemed genuinely scared by the implications. “The fact that someone died is not a joke,” he wrote. “If you’re going to keep making those jokes leave the fucking server.” They were desperate to integrate what had happened into their own narrative. “She died by being on the wrong side of history,” Beeravon wrote. James Brower then added, “One person being a bad Apple doesn’t represent the whole movement.” Still, their optics had been ruined. “The best way to take control of this situation is to raise money for the family of the woman that died,” suggested Stan—PA. “The leadership should start a fundraiser.” They landed on blaming the city and the police and the governor for prematurely shutting down the event. “This man was clearly outraged that his civil rights were trampled on and his only outlet to let his frustration out was taken from him,” wrote Mr. Bulldops.
They had stepped out into the light. And even with the death of Heather Heyer and the enormous and instantaneous backlash that would ultimately catapult them back into the shadows, they still felt a little victorious. The fact that they were dominating the news that weekend, that the alt-right had made itself known and appeared unafraid, seemed like an achievement. It had been a moment that, as Kessler told them, “shook the rafters of the entire political establishment.”
Discord was a big part of that success. Dan Feidt, one of the Unicorn Riot hackers who cracked open the server, thought a lot about the platform in the days after Charlottesville. The big advantage, as he saw it, was the number of closed rooms it gave them to work together but also apart. “I know that some of the groups moved on to different messaging platforms like Signal. But that doesn’t really help you create a lobby. When Discord was in its heyday, it had a front area, kind of a back area, different servers serving different functions, crossover areas, cross-pollinating areas.” It made them feel as if they were “mentally in a whole subculture.”
Within days of the rally, that subculture was under siege. A number of internet service providers made an aggressive show of shutting down any white supremacist presence. The fate of the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi flagship website, was emblematic. On August 13, GoDaddy, the web hosting company, informed Andrew Anglin that he had twenty-four hours to register his domain somewhere else. The site moved to Google the next day and was promptly kicked off; it was finally forced into the Dark Web, where it can be accessed only with special software. As for Discord, whether they had been aware of what was happening on their platform or not, the founders claimed to be disgusted. They immediately deleted more than a hundred alt-right servers and soon put in place a Trust and Safety unit to research and stamp out any hate groups who might use their site. This was the deplatforming of the alt-right, forcing them to scurry for cover and to search out even more covert places where they could converse. Jason Kessler experienced perhaps the most ignominious version of this. Saddled with legal fees from all the lawsuits brought against him by those injured in the attack, he was forced to move back into his parents’ house. Once while Kessler was being interviewed on an alt-right livestream, his father’s voice could be heard off camera, yelling at his son, “Hey, get out of my room! Jason, this is my room!” For Kessler, at least, there was truly nowhere left to go.
