Antisocial, p.16
Antisocial, page 16
Something was happening online: a new kind of invisible primary, an attempt, either coordinated or spontaneous, to stretch the Overton window so radically as to drag the notion of a Trump presidency into the realm of the imaginable. Who was doing it? Trump was a ready-made meme, but the virus wasn’t propagating itself. There were already credible rumors that some of the pro-Trump activity was being generated by Russian troll farms; still, even if many of those rumors turned out to be true, the Russians couldn’t possibly account for all of the activity, or even most of it. Whatever was happening, it was comforting to assume that it was happening to us—that the American electorate was being manipulated by ratings-obsessed executives at CNN, or by rapacious Wall Street bankers angling for corporate handouts, or by Putin. But the truth was that a lot of what was happening to the American people was being done by the American people. I just didn’t know who was doing it, exactly, or how.
“What if I could find the people who are peddling this stuff?” I said. “What if I could find the Emerson Spartz of fringe politics?”
Remnick’s eyebrows shot up. He saw it right away. “That could be a story,” he said.
PART THREE
Too Big to Ignore
The desire . . . to make a face or say a dirty word. Was this the face they all wanted to make? To show somebody, to show everybody? They wouldn’t do it, though; they wouldn’t get the chance. Special circumstances were required. A lurid, unreal place, the middle of the night, a staggering unhinging weariness, the sudden, hallucinatory appearance of your true enemy.
Alice Munro, 1977
CHAPTER TWELVE
Beyond Good and Evil
Mike Cernovich grew up in Kewanee, a small hog-farming town in central Illinois. His mother, a homemaker, hadn’t finished high school; his father worked at a local factory. On Sundays, the family worshipped in home churches, where the preachers spoke in tongues and taught the inerrant truth of the Bible. Mike’s mother heard voices, and some days she was too depressed to get out of bed. The congregation formed a prayer circle around her, trying to cast out her demons, but it didn’t work. Eventually, she got desperate and went to the hospital. They diagnosed her as bipolar and gave her medication, and she started to feel better after that.
Mike had two younger brothers and an older half sister. They didn’t starve, but there were holes in the carpet that their parents couldn’t afford to fix, and the grocery budget was too tight to allow for any snacks between meals. Once, Mike dropped a glass jar of peanut butter and it shattered on the kitchen floor. He looked at it for a long time—the sticky mound coated in glittering dust, a sail of glass jutting into the air—before accepting that he would have to throw it all away.
Cernovich was a Croatian name, but nobody in the family cooked any traditional dishes or expressed any nostalgia for the Old Country. They were Americans. Mike’s paternal grandfather came to Kewanee at the age of five. As a young man during World War II, he joined the navy and fought in the Pacific; then he came back to Kewanee and worked as an Illinois state policeman for three decades before retiring and collecting his pension. He was a party-line Democrat, but some of his children, including Mike’s father, ended up voting for Reagan and thinking of themselves as Republicans. They ribbed each other about it sometimes, the way a Cubs fan might tease a White Sox fan, but nobody took politics all that seriously.
Mike was a shy kid, pudgy and brooding, with an angry streak that often turned inward. He had asthma and eczema—not debilitating, but enough to make him feel uncomfortable almost all the time. Intelligent and contrarian, he could debate anything with anyone. Sometimes, though, he’d argue with the wrong person—challenging a teacher’s unearned authority, or asking a preacher how a benevolent God could send non-Christian babies to Hell—and this would land him in trouble. For the most part, he kept to himself.
He was eager to finish high school, but he didn’t give much thought to what would come afterward. A lot of guys in Kewanee joined the military; the ones who didn’t tended to stay in town, get married, and look for work at a restaurant or a gas station or a big-box store. A few made it as far as the University of Illinois, either the main campus in Urbana-Champaign or the one in the state capital, Springfield; but even if they graduated, they usually just ended up back home. When Mike was a junior in high school, the top student in the class above him got into the University of Chicago. Only years later did Mike learn that this was a rare achievement—at the time, he figured that a city was smaller than a state, so the University of Chicago had to be a less selective school than the University of Illinois.
When he was seventeen, Mike enlisted in the National Guard. Two weekends a month, and for two weeks over the summer, he trained at the National Guard Armory in Kewanee. He liked it well enough—he practiced marksmanship, got in shape, even learned how to box and won a few amateur fights. It still sounded corny when adults moralized about the value of hard work, but Mike also started to see the truth in it. He remembered when he couldn’t do five push-ups in a row; now he could do fifty, no problem.
After he graduated from high school, he thought about signing up for active duty. It was the late 1990s; the U.S. wasn’t fighting any ground wars, but still, maybe he’d get assigned to an army base somewhere exotic. His father, who wasn’t usually much of a talker, sat him down and tried to change his mind. “You’re smart enough for college,” his father said. “Just try it and see. If you don’t do it now, you’ll end up working dead-end jobs like me.” There was a community college in the neighboring town, a few miles south on Route 78. Mike didn’t always get along with his father, but he respected him enough to sign up for a semester.
The professors let him criticize any text, including the Bible and the Constitution. You were allowed, even encouraged, to make extreme arguments: that logic or truth or beauty were meaningless concepts, or that studying the words of dead white slaveholders was a waste of time. The professors claimed that they wanted their students to be as open minded as possible, but of course that wasn’t really true. There were limits, and you learned pretty quickly what they were. When you discussed the Republic, for example, you weren’t supposed to wonder whether Plato may have been right that, when it came to most tasks outside the home, “a woman is inferior to a man.” It struck Mike as a bit hypocritical to place constraints, even informal ones, on intellectual discourse. Wouldn’t Plato, of all people, have wanted his ideas to be debated openly?
Still, Mike loved college. He transferred to the Springfield campus of the University of Illinois, and the Illinois Veteran Grant Program paid his tuition. Learning to write a twenty-page paper was like training to do fifty push-ups—it seemed like you couldn’t do it, and at first you couldn’t, but you just did one push-up, and then a week later you could do five, and then eventually you could do fifty. You were the same person all along, but at first you had a mental image of yourself as someone who couldn’t achieve your goal, and that mental image was the first thing you needed to overcome. Although he didn’t say it out loud to anyone, he had decided that he didn’t want to be a Christian, he didn’t want to be poor, and he didn’t want to spend his whole life stuck in Kewanee. Those had always seemed like things that were bound to happen to him, but he wasn’t just going to let the expected things happen to him anymore.
He was drawn to modern Continental philosophy, especially Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he considered a visionary. Not only was Christianity incorrect, Nietzsche wrote; it was absurd, “unbelievable,” and everything that rested on it—“for example, the whole of European morality”—was overdue for “a sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm.” This would be painful, Nietzsche argued, but also necessary, because traditional morality was a form of spiritual enslavement, a way for the ruling classes to keep the rest of society fearful and weak. A more natural state of affairs would be for “the higher man” to seek power and self-fulfillment, not through Christian meekness but through bold force of will. “A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil. Such a striver would need great reserves of confidence and perseverance, because truly independent thinkers were often scorned and marginalized, at least during their lifetimes.*
Whenever Mike considered what his own version of self-fulfillment might look like, he thought more about the pursuit—the hero’s journey, as Carl Jung called it—than about the end result. The goal was almost irrelevant. It probably wouldn’t be money. As far as Mike could tell, most rich people didn’t seem all that happy. Maybe it would be something more like influence, or a legacy that would outlive him. The only way he could describe it, when he tried putting it into words, was that he wanted to become too big to ignore.
His survey courses in philosophy also covered postmodernists like Foucault and Lacan and Derrida. A lot of what they wrote struck him as faux-intellectual bullshit, but he boiled it down until it made sense to him. The postmodernists seemed to be arguing that there was no single, absolute truth—that everything was just a narrative, a socially contingent power struggle, which implied that even history and current events were subject to personal interpretation, the way novels and movies were. Mike didn’t know whether this was objectively true, but it was an interesting way to look at the world. Outside of class, at a Barnes & Noble, he bought copies of Adbusters, the radical left magazine that would one day inspire the Occupy protests. As the name implied, Adbusters carried no ads; it railed against late capitalism and all forms of corporate media, promoting such initiatives as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. Convinced that TV had done nothing to improve his life, and generally indisposed to half measures, Mike got rid of his TV and ended up abstaining for five years.
During summer break, he went back to Kewanee and worked at Menards, a chain home-goods store. One of his coworkers, a middle-aged guy named Greg, recognized Mike’s intelligence and drive, calling him “a budding Tony Robbins.” Greg recommended Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Mike drove to Peoria to buy it, and he was persuaded by Rand’s endorsement of radical selfishness. Why should great men—the “prime movers” who made society flourish—be held back by mediocrity and red tape? Until someone convinced him otherwise, he decided, he would be a libertarian.
* * *
—
His closest friend in Springfield was Melvin Armstrong, a political-science student and a committed leftist. A few times a week, they went powerlifting together; every Friday night, after leaving the gym, they’d go to Ryan’s, a restaurant with an all-you-can-eat dinner buffet.* Armstrong, who is black, had grown up in the foster-care system of Bloomington, Illinois, and then earned a GED. He and Cernovich ragged on their classmates from Lake Forest and Winnetka, the soft, entitled rich kids who had no idea what it was like to apply for a loan or to hold down a shitty job. Cernovich made Armstrong watch Good Will Hunting with him again and again, especially the scene where Matt Damon tells the smug Harvard student, “You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.”
“You’ll be serving my kids fries at a drive-through on our way to a skiing trip,” the Harvard guy retorts.
“Yeah, maybe,” Will says. “But at least I won’t be unoriginal.” Then Will challenges the Harvard guy to a fight, the guy backs down, and Will ends up getting the girl.
Once, Cernovich was hanging out with a bunch of Armstrong’s friends, all of whom were black. One of them needed to get to his girlfriend’s house. “Borrow my car,” Mike said, handing the guy his keys.
Everyone burst out laughing. “Cerno, are you stupid?” Armstrong said.
“It’s an old junker,” Cernovich said. “Trust me, no one will steal it.”
“That’s not the point,” Armstrong’s friend explained. “If I get pulled over, what am I supposed to say? ‘You see, officer, some white guy gave me his car, that’s why my name doesn’t match the registration’?”
“If that happens, have the cop call me,” Cernovich said. “I’ll vouch for you.”
They laughed even harder at this. “You really are something else, man,” Armstrong said.
Cernovich tried to look at things rationally. “Blacks are treated differently by police, and this is such a duh point that it’s not even worth arguing,” he wrote later. “Yet I don’t toe the party line. . . . I don’t hate myself for being white. I don’t ‘check my privilege.’ I rather like myself, actually.”
He graduated and applied to law school. He was good at arguing, and a law degree seemed like a way to gain cultural capital, although he still wasn’t sure what he would do with it. He chose Pepperdine—not because it was a Christian school, although that was what he told his parents, but because it was in Malibu, overlooking a ruggedly beautiful stretch of the Pacific. No one had been able to talk him out of libertarianism, so when he got to Pepperdine he joined the Federalist Society. A few weeks into school, he asked one of his classmates, a good-looking woman from a well-educated family, for a ride to an off-campus bar. They had such a good conversation on the way that they forgot all about the bar; instead, they spent the whole night driving around and talking. They didn’t have much in common, at least superficially—she was neither white nor working class, and she wasn’t particularly interested in philosophy or politics—but they fell for each other, and before they finished law school they were married.
In 2004, a few weeks before graduation, Cernovich made his first website. It was a legal blog called Crime & Federalism; its mission was “to expose prosecutorial, police, and other governmental misconduct.” Writing under a pseudonym, Cernovich posted straightforward Supreme Court news (“Cert. Granted in Raich”) and occasional digressions into online solipsism (“Woo hoo! I just made it to Page 1 of Google for the search term federalism”). He was still indisposed to half measures, and he started pushing his contrarian ideas to their most radical conclusions. Part of him, the part that craved social acceptance, was tempted to cling to his old, safe beliefs; but true intellectual courage would mean rethinking everything from first principles, pursuing the truth wherever it led. “No shepherd, and one herd!” Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “Everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into a madhouse.” In college, those words had seemed like a cryptic fable. The older Cernovich got, the more they seemed like a prophesy, even a personal challenge. How would he live if he were truly unafraid? Where would he go if he could leave the herd behind?
He had trouble finding work after law school, largely due to an unresolved rape charge. A few summers earlier, back home in Illinois, he’d had sex with a woman he knew from college. He claimed that, although they’d both been drinking, the sex was consensual. The woman claimed that it wasn’t, and she went to the police. Five years later, in 2009, Cernovich was cleared of the charge and his record was expunged.
The experience seemed to break something open inside of him. “When you are falsely accused of rape,” he said on a podcast later, “you realize that everything you had been told about the legal system was a lie. What other lies have we been told, and what are the source of those lies?” He blogged about his case on Crime & Federalism, referring to it as State v. Anonymous. Near the end of the post, without identifying himself as Anonymous, he slipped into the first person. “That case completely changed my view on how the criminal justice system treats date-rape cases,” he wrote. “I reject feminism as the enslavement philosophy that it is.”
* * *
—
After law school, his wife got a job as an in-house lawyer for a tech company. They moved to San Francisco, renting an apartment a couple of blocks away from an elliptical urban garden called South Park.* The California Bar Association wouldn’t accept him—his rape charge was still pending—so he couldn’t join a law firm or start a solo practice. Instead, he picked up whatever freelance work he could, doing legal research or writing unsigned briefs. The rest of the time, he read widely across the open internet. In college, he’d been exposed to new ideas in his classes, or in magazines, or through friends. On social media, bouncing from tab to tab, he might encounter a dozen mind-blowing ideas before lunch. It was as if he’d been becalmed in a sailboat for years and now, suddenly, gale-force winds were blowing him in all directions.
He started blogging about much more than crime and federalism. Whenever the mood struck, he would open his laptop, take a series of sharp, deep breaths, work himself into a flow state, and start typing. The words that came out were often a surprise even to him. Every time he pressed “Publish,” he could feel his pulse quicken. “Soon enough, adrenaline becomes your trusted friend,” he wrote. “You inhale deeply through your nostrils, and feel the life-affirming drug lift your soul.”
He floated outlandish theories about gender relations (“Men are the new black”), nutrition (“If you’re not already taking 3–6 grams of fish oil and 2,000 IUs of Vitamin D a day, you’re literally killing yourself”), endocrinology (“Steroids are not just effective, they are healthy and life enhancing”), and politics (“America is a powder keg that is about to erupt”). By now he was blogging under his real name. This was risky—in theory, his innermost thoughts could be read by almost anyone in the world—and yet blogging still felt almost private. It seemed to occupy a middle space: less vulnerable than exposing your inner psyche on national TV, less pathetic than ranting alone in your kitchen.
