Antisocial, p.21
Antisocial, page 21
Shauna made espresso. “I’ll take coconut cream in mine, if we have it,” Mike said. He sat at the kitchen table and placed his laptop next to a scented candle and a teapot full of flowers. “Shauna’s in charge of decorating,” he explained. I sat next to him, opened my laptop, and made my font size as small as possible, so that I could type my unprocessed impressions without worrying that he’d read them over my shoulder.
He responded to a few emails, then scanned the recent Amazon sales figures for Gorilla Mindset, his men’s rights self-help book. There were hundreds of reviews, most of which gave the book five out of five stars. In the Kindle store, Gorilla Mindset was filed under “gender studies.” It was the top seller in that category, just above We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Cernovich’s book sales were both a point of pride and a rhetorical cudgel. “When a cuckservative or an SJW gets into a Twitter battle with me, and they’re an author, one of my favorite moves is to go, ‘How’re your book sales doin’, buddy?’” he said. “They back down after that, ’cause it’s quantifiable. I sell books. The only SJW who really sells more than I do is Ta-Nehisi Coates—that guy’s a whole tier or two above me. He’s selling indulgences to white liberals, absolving them of their white guilt, which, I’ve gotta hand it to him, is a great niche market.”
He checked his WordPress dashboard: “Right now one hundred twenty-eight people are reading Danger & Play. What’s fun is when you get a hot story and watch the number tick up into the thousands, like a video game.”
In another tab, he opened his Twitter analytics.* He asked me to open my own Twitter account, on my laptop, so that he could give me a free coaching session. “How many followers do you have?” he asked. The way he said it, he might have been asking me how much I could bench press. He continued, “There are a few easy things you can do right away to get your stats up.”
“I’m good,” I said. I didn’t doubt that Cernovich’s tips would work; I did wonder whether they would allow me to keep my job, or my self-respect.
He got a text from a friend. Rush Limbaugh had just mentioned the hashtag #ZombieHillary on the radio. “I would like to claim credit for it, but I can’t,” Limbaugh said. “Somebody on Twitter did it.” That somebody was Cernovich, enlisting his followers to get the hashtag trending. “He’ll never mention me by name,” Cernovich said. “But he’s at least listening to the periphery.”
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Shauna brought mugs of coffee to the kitchen table. She told the story of how she’d met Mike, in 2011, at a bar in Santa Monica. “He was pretty aggressive,” she said. “He grabbed my arm, pulled me into him, and said, ‘You fit nicely.’”
“It sounds creepy, but it looked less creepy in context,” Mike said.
“It worked,” Shauna said. “We were making out, like, five minutes later.”
When they started dating, Mike said, “She was just, like, a little puppy dog.* I didn’t take it seriously. But she just refused to go away, and now—”
“I’m married and pregnant!” Shauna said, smiling.
“And my life is over,” Mike said, half smiling.
Shauna sat next to Mike, stroking his arm. “We’re having a girl!” she said. “I think it’ll be good for him, soften him up a bit.”
They planned to name her Cyra, after Cyrus the Great. “I’ll be nice to her, as long as she’s not a basic bitch,” Mike said.
Early in their relationship, Shauna read the archives of Danger & Play, including such posts as “How to Cheat on Your Girlfriend.” “I would come home from work crying,” Shauna said. “‘How can you write these terrible things?’ He’d go, ‘You don’t understand, babe, this is just how guys talk.’” (Advice from Danger & Play: “Always call your girl ‘babe,’” to avoid mixing up names.) Shauna continued, “I was still upset, though, and he eventually deleted some older posts.”
“I rewrote some of the wording,” Mike insisted. “I never disavow things I’ve said.” His facial expression remained impassive, but under the table he started wheeling his wrists in tight circles.
* * *
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Outside, the weather was perfect, the sort of halcyon day that happens maybe ten times a year in New York and two hundred times a year in Orange County. We stayed inside, to avoid screen glare. I brought up a few of his many verifiable lies—about Muslim migration, campus rape statistics, and several other topics. He didn’t deny or disavow any of his previous claims. Instead, he reinterpreted my line of questioning more abstractly. “Am I fake news?” he said. “No, I believe what I write. I might get things wrong here and there, but the hoaxing mainstream media gets things wrong all the time.” He rattled off a list of stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times that were later corrected.
I made counterarguments: How did the proportion of their erroneous stories compare to the proportion on Danger & Play? What methods did he have in place to fact-check his stories before he ran them, or to issue corrections? Did he even do reporting, properly speaking? Yet my objections weren’t landing. I could feel myself getting pulled into his frame.
“I’m sufficiently complex that there’s no one truth about me,” he said. “Am I a ranting maniac on Twitter? Yeah, but I’m also a pretty mellow married guy who’s into hiking and walking his dog. Is Sean Penn kind of a basic bitch? Sure, but he got the only interview with El Chapo.* This is why the hoaxing media is so triggered by me. They can only keep saying ‘Don’t listen to him; he’s not legit’ for so long. I’ll keep saying the opposite, and I’ll keep getting more views on Periscope.”
He took a sip of coffee and sat back, resting his hands behind his head. He was giving me good copy, and he knew it. “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college,” he said. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”
* * *
• • •
I kept trying to pin down what he actually believed. Of all the ways he could be spending his time, why was he working so hard to prevent Clinton from becoming president? “There are a million things wrong with Hillary,” he said. “She’s the pro-war candidate. She’s massively corrupt. She wants to let in more so-called refugees”—especially those from the Muslim world—“which is an existential threat.”*
But he wasn’t merely interested in raising principled objections; he wanted to have an impact on the election, and that meant identifying memes that would incite a sharp spike of emotion. Stories about corruption might cause a moment of brow-furrowing concern, but they didn’t produce much social media engagement. “I was looking at the conversation online—what was getting through to people and what wasn’t—and none of that was sticking,” he said. “It’s too complex. I thought that the health stuff would be more visceral, more resonant from a persuasion standpoint, and so I pushed that.”
In March 2016, during a Democratic debate, he tweeted, “Hillary’s face looks like melting candle wax. Imagine what her brain looks like.” Later that month, he tweeted a photo of Clinton winking, which he interpreted as “a mild stroke.” By August, it was “obvious” to him that Clinton was suffering from both a seizure disorder and Parkinson’s disease. On Twitter, he promoted hashtag after hashtag: #HillarysHealth, #CoughingHillary, #SickHillary. Coughing, of course, is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor; yet it’s relatively easy to make large swaths of Americans feel disgust, especially about an older woman, and disgust is an activating emotion.
The health rumors echoed through the far-right recesses of social media. In early August, they started to dominate the front page of the Drudge Report, which became the meme’s bridge to the mainstream. “Go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness,’ take a look at the videos for yourself,” Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and pugnacious Trump surrogate, said on Fox News. In early September, Donald Trump tweeted, “Mainstream media never covered Hillary’s massive ‘hacking’ or coughing attack, yet it is #1 trending. What’s up?” Still no fire, but an expanding circle of smoke machines.
Mainstream journalists remained unpersuaded, but they now deemed the rumor worthy of a response. On September 6, Chris Cillizza, a centrist Washington Post columnist and an astoundingly frictionless weathervane representing the latest in Beltway groupthink, published a piece called “Can We Just Stop Talking About Hillary’s Health Now?” In the column, he talked about Hillary’s health. “Led by Drudge, there have been questions circulating in the conservative media,” he wrote. “Here’s the thing: This is a totally ridiculous issue.”
Five days later, Clinton collapsed after attending a memorial service at Ground Zero. “She fainted!” Cernovich wrote on Facebook. “Yes it happened, Hillary Clinton fainted and collapsed on camera.” Clinton’s explanation, which she offered only after the fact, was that she’d come down with pneumonia. Without months of priming by Cernovich and others, her collapse may have been seen as an isolated event; without the scrutiny from her social media antagonists, Clinton may have been less secretive about her illness. But as it happened, the mainstream press started to convince itself that Hillary’s health might actually be a Thing after all. The incident was discussed on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. About two hours after footage of Clinton’s collapse went viral on social media, Chris Cillizza published another Washington Post column. This one was called “Hillary Clinton’s Health Just Became a Real Issue in the Presidential Campaign.”
Cernovich gained more than four thousand Twitter followers in a day. Scott Greer, the deputy editor of the conservative tabloid The Daily Caller, tweeted, “Cernovich memed #SickHillary into reality. Never doubt the power of memes.” Cernovich retweeted him. “I decline the Pulitzer for my work on Hillary’s health,” he wrote. “I will not accept a scam award from a scam organization.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Fitness and Unfitness
In November 1880, Chester Arthur, a Republican, was elected to serve as James Garfield’s vice president. The following month, The New York Times reported from near Arthur’s hometown, in Vermont: “A stranger arrived here a few days ago . . . to obtain evidence to show that Gen. Arthur is an unnaturalized foreigner.” The stranger was A. P. Hinman, who appeared to be a Democratic Party operative. The following week, Hinman sent a letter to the Times and several other newspapers, alleging that Arthur had been born in either Scotland or Ireland and was therefore ineligible to be vice president. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle printed the letter, calling the issue of Arthur’s birth “an important and curious question.” But journalists could find no evidence to support the rumor, and for a few months the story lay dormant.
In July 1881, President Garfield was shot and gravely wounded. Throughout the summer, as his condition deteriorated, journalists reconsidered Hinman’s claim that Vice President Arthur, now next in line for the presidency, had been born abroad. The New York Sun, a pro-Democrat newspaper, launched a thorough investigation. In September, Garfield died and Arthur was sworn in as president. The following day, the Sun ran a long article announcing its finding: the rumor about Arthur’s foreign birth was without merit.
In 1884, Hinman, now alleging that Arthur had in fact been born in Canada, self-published a 90-page pamphlet called How a British Subject Became President of the United States, a strange mash-up of tedious bureaucratic correspondence and self-aggrandizing poetry. Arthur disregarded it, as did the press. Many Americans, if not most, never heard about Hinman’s allegations, and they had no appreciable effect on Arthur’s legacy. In the 1880s, or even the 1980s, journalists could hamper the spread of a meritless story by debunking it, or simply by ignoring it.
* * *
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Yahoo Answers is an online forum that allows anyone to ask any question, no matter how inane. On May 23, 2007, three months after Barack Obama announced his presidential campaign, there were dozens of active threads on the forum, including “What coulour tie should I wear?” and “I am little bit fat, & have big stomatch?” and “Global warming?” An anonymous poster added a new question: “If Obama bin HUSSEIN al Barack was born in Kenya, how can he run for president in the US?” This received forty-four replies, ranging from “He shouldn’t run, I certainly won’t be voting for him or the lesbian” to “sigh. dont be such a racist.”
For a few months, the rumor about Obama’s birth persisted in chain emails and obscure blogs, but traditional newspapers and TV broadcasters ignored it. After all, one of the primary responsibilities of the media is to mediate—to distinguish spin from substance, fact from fabrication—and the rumor, being without merit, was deemed unfit to print. By the Darwinian definition of fitness that prevailed on the viral internet, however, the meme was perfectly poised for success.
In 2008, WorldNetDaily picked up the story. The site, also known as WND, featured a big-tent hybrid of Moral Majority conservatism (columns by Phyllis Schlafly and Alan Keyes), nativist paleoconservatism (columns by Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan), and full-on battiness (“Islam’s 20-point plan for conquering the United States by 2020”). Its stories were often featured on the Drudge Report, which brought in a lot of traffic. Shortly before Election Day, WND published an article called “Obama ‘Admits’ Kenyan Birth?” Two days later, Rush Limbaugh, the most popular radio broadcaster in the country, invoked the rumor during drive time. “This birth-certificate business—I’m just wondering if something’s up,” he said. “I’m telling you, this has not reached the threshold until now, and it’s popping up all over the place.”
* * *
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Donald Trump first flirted with a presidential run in 1987. He flew to New Hampshire four months before the state’s crucial primary election to deliver what he insisted was not a campaign speech. (His proposed economic policy, verbatim: “Whatever Japan wants, do the opposite.”) The stunt garnered a bit of mainstream press coverage—“New Hampshire Speech Earns Praise for Trump” was the headline in The New York Times—but not enough, apparently, to justify a full campaign. The crowd thrilled to Trump’s jingoist bravado. “If he doesn’t do it in ’88, I’m looking forward to ’92,” an audience member told a reporter from the Detroit Free Press. It was still the age of mass media, however, and most members of the audience—the ones who did not happen to find themselves standing next to professional journalists—were receivers, not yet transmitters.
In 1999, Trump tried again, musing about a presidential run on Larry King Live. Again, the press responded with fleeting curiosity and then moved on, starving the story of oxygen. By the end of 1999, the only poll that listed Trump as a serious contender was a hundred-person “unscientific survey” conducted by the National Enquirer.*
In 2011, Trump floated the most bizarre trial balloon in American political history. This time, instead of going straight to the mainstream media, he started by trying to generate buzz on the internet. First, Trump instructed his loyal fixer, Michael Cohen, to set up a site called ShouldTrumpRun.com.* Then Trump took to Twitter. “THe people at shouldtrumprun.com have got it right!” he tweeted. “How are our factories supposed to compete with China and other countries when they have no environmental restrictions!” (The erratic capitalization indicated that the tweet was not the product of a sleek PR firm but the handiwork of the man himself.)
Trump tweeted links to ShouldTrumpRun.com a couple more times, but the response was modest. There was nothing to command people’s attention—no news hook, no controversy, no meme with momentum. Trump seemed to move on, tweeting about nonpolitical pursuits. (“THe Westminster Dog Show asked if I’d be interested in meeting Hickory, a Scottish Deerhound, who won Best in Show. She came to visit today!”) Behind the scenes, though, he was still working to stir up interest in his presidential bid, or at least in himself.
Trump talked to Joseph Farah, the editor of WND, and to Jerome Corsi, one of the site’s lead writers. “He was looking for a smoking-gun kind of sound bite that would resonate with people,” Farah later told The New York Times. The sound bite Trump chose was the meme about Obama’s forged birth certificate. Trump knew instinctively that the attention marketplace was oversaturated, that the usual things (an interview with Larry King, a visit with a prize-winning deerhound) were growing easier for the public to ignore. But an outrageous conspiracy theory about Obama’s foreign birth—birtherism, as it became known—would incite a sharp spike of activating emotion, either positive or negative, in everyone who heard it.
For six weeks, Trump talked incessantly about birtherism, combining traditional media and social media in a kind of feedback loop. Whenever a journalist gave him a microphone, he talked into it; when there were no microphones around, he kept the conversation going online. On March 23, appearing on ABC’s The View, Trump said, “I want him to show his birth certificate. There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” Barbara Walters, one of the show’s cohosts and a living embodiment of a traditional media gatekeeper, tried to shut down the conversation: “That’s a terrible thing to say.” It didn’t seem to make a bit of difference. “I like it because it upset those lightweights on The View,” one fan tweeted. Another wrote, “An orange man in the white house?”
Most candidates are willing to pander, but only up to a point. Eventually, even the most shameless and mercenary of politicians will run up against a fact too plain to contradict, a principle too sacred to violate, a layer of dignity that would be too humiliating to shed. But Trump seemed to have no interest in dignity, no capacity for shame, and no discernible ethos beyond self-promotion. The mob could point in any direction, and he would trundle forth. He was no expert in social media algorithms—he didn’t even use a computer—but he knew how to read a room. Besides, on Twitter, the built-in analytics tools did most of the room-reading for you. One pattern was obvious: the more incendiary your message, and the more loudly and forcefully you repeated it, the more attention you could get. For most of his life, Trump could get press coverage only by doing something notable in the world—building a casino, cheating on his wife, giving a speech in New Hampshire. In the age of social media, the bar was lower. The precipitating event for mainstream-media coverage could be nothing more than “starting a conversation” online.
