Antisocial, p.23
Antisocial, page 23
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When I’d first landed in California, before visiting Cernovich’s house, I’d driven straight from the airport to the Hermosa Beach boardwalk, where Cernovich was hosting an outdoor meetup for Danger & Play readers. A few dozen people showed up, including a few women and a few people of color. Shauna, wearing a tight dress with a plunging neckline, sat at a table eating a bacon cheeseburger. “My friends assume there will only be awkward internet people at these things,” she said. “I’m always telling them, ‘There are actually some cute guys!’”
Cernovich sipped iced tea from a pint glass while his admirers asked him questions. “What about Hillary’s body count?” a young man said. He was alluding to rumors, ubiquitous on the fringe internet, that Clinton had caused the deaths of dozens of her enemies—Seth Rich, Vince Foster, John F. Kennedy Jr.—either by ordering them killed or by murdering them herself.
“The more high-powered you are, the more people you know,” Cernovich said. “The more people you know, the more dead people you know. So how much of that is confirmation bias?”
The admirer looked deflated.
“Then again,” Cernovich said, “Bill’s brother was a drug dealer, and they do have ties to organized crime, so who knows?”
The admirer perked up. “She’s fucking going to prison,” he said.
I talked to a big bald white guy who looked like Mr. Clean. He called himself a racial identitarian. “The game changer for me was Steve Sailer,” he said. “Once I looked into human biodiversity—really looked at it, without worrying about the thought police—I went, ‘Wow, how brainwashed have I been?’” I asked if he would tell me his name, and he laughed. “Not a chance,” he said. “I have a job. I’m not trying to get doxed.”
Jeff Martinez, a cybersecurity consultant with a surfer-bro twang, read Cernovich’s Twitter feed every day, as a counterweight to traditional journalism. “The corporate news is fucking fake, dude,” he said. “You can just tell.” An informal poll revealed that no one at the meetup believed in polls. Trump was going to be president, no matter what the hoaxing media said.
Most of the conversations centered on free speech (which everyone was for) and political correctness (which everyone was against). “I’m sick of the censorship, the words you can’t say,” Steven McHale, a marketing analyst with coiffed gray hair, told me. “Every conversation feels radioactive.” Another woman, an oncologist, spoke with a Soviet-bloc accent but refused to say where she was from. “When I first came to America,” she said, “I didn’t have to think so hard before saying anything. Now I do. That’s sad.”
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A few weeks earlier, on a Sunday in Brooklyn, I’d biked to Prospect Park to meet some friends for a picnic—iced coffees, berries in vented plastic containers, New York Times sections rotating to each according to need.
“I recently realized what this election is,” one woman said. “It’s the article versus the comments section.”
“Did you just come up with that?” her boyfriend asked, impressed.
“I think I saw it on Twitter,” she said.
On the boardwalk in Hermosa Beach, a woman wearing an Infowars T-shirt asked me about The New Yorker’s comments section. How aggressively was it moderated? According to what bias? Was the government involved?
“We don’t have a comments section,” I said.
Her surprise quickly curdled to scorn. “Right,” she said. “Of course you don’t.”
I told her about an analogy I’d recently heard: that this election was like the article running against the comments section.
“It is!” she said, her face brightening. “It’s so true. The globalist elites versus the real Americans.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Poise Is a Club
The week I visited Cernovich’s house, the most popular video on his YouTube channel was called “Un/Convention: Exposing Fake News at the RNC and DNC.” “You can no longer trust the media,” a title card read over a score of throbbing dubstep. “Mike Cernovich attended both conventions. Here’s what really happened.” The screen pulsed with urgent, glitchy effects: the revolution, televised. Cernovich wandered around the half-empty streets of downtown Cleveland, wearing aviator sunglasses and a bandanna, filming with his selfie stick. “I wanna bring back real journalism to the people,” he said.
Cernovich didn’t post any footage from inside the Quicken Loans Arena, where the Republican National Convention had taken place, because he hadn’t been granted access to the building. He had, however, been invited to a party a mile away, where the guest list included Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Roosh V, the Islamophobic blogger Pamela Geller, and Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDARE. The party was organized by Jim Hoft, of The Gateway Pundit, who had recently come out as a “conservative gay activist.” The walls were lined with large framed photos—half-nude young men in MAGA hats, some carrying semiautomatic rifles—made by Lucian Wintrich as part of a project he called Twinks4Trump. Yiannopoulos and Geller gave speeches, sticking to three main themes: homophilia, Islamophobia, and MAGA. The logic went like this: some Muslim-majority countries oppress gay people; therefore, vote Trump. It was hardly an airtight argument. Yet the spectacle achieved its primary goal, which was to pack the room with reporters. (Laurie Penny, a journalist who attended the gathering and wrote about it for The Guardian, described it as “a carpeted ballroom on the seventh floor of hell.”)
Two nights later, Trump gave a speech formally accepting the Republican Party’s nomination. He wanted to be perceived as the law-and-order candidate, and he did not use subtlety to convey his message. “I will restore law and order,” he said. “I am the law-and-order candidate.” He claimed that “illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.”
The next day, The New York Times ran a piece of news analysis. “With all the political orthodoxy that Donald J. Trump tore up in his convention speech,” it began, “he set aside a core tenet of the American narrative on immigration: that the United States is a nation of nations, built on the sweat and initiative of people who came from other countries.” Steve Sailer wrote a barbed and boastful response: “NYT Complains Trump Doesn’t Submit to The Narrative.” For years, Sailer had blogged about citizenism in obscurity. Now his fringe vocabulary was hurtling toward the center of American discourse.
In a YouTube video for the Rebel, Gavin McInnes chided the establishment, especially the Republican establishment, for perpetuating “the rhetoric of ‘We’re a nation of immigrants.’ We’re not, by the way. We’re a nation of citizens.” Even Ann Coulter, speaking at a Trump rally in Iowa, marveled at how quickly the unsayable had been made sayable. “Since Donald Trump has announced that he’s running for president, I feel like I’m dreaming,” she said. “I can’t believe I turn on the TV, and on prime-time TV every night they’re talking about anchor babies, they’re talking about sanctuary cities, they’re talking about Mexican rapists.”
Shortly before the election, Cernovich self-published another book on Amazon. It was called MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again. The cover—a cartoon of a resplendent Trump, thick rays of fulvous sunshine, and an ascending phoenix—looked like a freeze-frame image from a Pixar adaptation of Triumph of the Will. In the book, Cernovich didn’t make any explicit sops to white nationalism, but his dog whistles were as clear as ever.*
Whenever I confronted Cernovich about his long record of open misogyny, he downplayed his old tweets and blog posts as mere “locker-room talk.” After a tape was released in which Donald Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” Trump used precisely the same excuse. “I don’t know if someone gave him a copy of Gorilla Mindset or if it’s just great minds thinking alike,” Cernovich said, “but I am more impressed with Trump every day.”
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In late September, Cernovich flew to New York to cover the first Trump-Clinton debate, at Hofstra University on Long Island. He planned to spend the evening on the perimeter of campus, outside the Secret Service checkpoint, livestreaming and tweeting. “I wanna be with the people,” he explained. Also, again, he hadn’t been granted press credentials to get inside. A few hours before the debate started, he sent me a text from the road: “Almost there. U?”
I was inside the gates, with the rest of the establishment media. “Is there any way Hillary can lose tonight?” I asked Jesse Jackson, who happened to be standing next to me as we waited to pass through a metal detector. “Long answers,” he said. “Gotta go short on words, long on meaning.” Appropriately enough, that was all he said.
I passed through a beer tent sponsored by Anheuser-Busch (“#BrewDemocracy”) and wandered toward the center of campus, where Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC had all set up temporary stages. It was unseasonably muggy; whenever the on-air lights went dark, makeup artists rushed toward the talent to blot and powder. VIP golf carts rolled by, laden with Beltway demicelebrities outpacing the selfie-seeking throngs.
On the MSNBC stage, Chris Hayes was on air, arguing via earpiece with Omarosa Manigault. A former reality-show villain known for her not-here-to-make-friends persona on The Apprentice, Manigault was now one of Donald Trump’s most prominent campaign surrogates.
“I want to start with the birther thing,” Hayes said.
“He’s put that to bed and he’s ready to move on,” Manigault said, changing the subject to the economy.
Hayes tried to butt in several times by repeating the word “respectfully,” but Manigault kept filibustering about jobs.
Nearby was a long row of smaller media tents: BBC, AFP, Al Jazeera, Czech Public Radio. A Hofstra student, wearing a badge identifying her as a Social Media Debate Volunteer, held her phone aloft, in selfie mode, as a bevy of satellite trucks idled behind her. “So exciting, you guys,” she said. “HofDebate2016 is the hashtag. Follow on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Live. Stay with us to get the full experience of the Hofstra student experience.”
On the quad, for every Clinton or Trump sign, there was one promoting a joke candidate: Vermin Supreme 2016, Giant Swarm of Bees 2016. “Sir!” a student shouted, pretending to hold a microphone at ankle height. “Just one question, sir, if I may!” Looking down, I noticed that he was addressing a squirrel.
Here and there, groups of four or five young men—boys, really—strode forward, taking up as much space as possible, all rolling shoulders and self-satisfied grins. Most of them wore MAGA hats, but even without any identifying flair, you could tell at a glance that they were Trump kids. They had a giddiness about them, as if they were getting away with something. A line floated into my mind—“The entering boys, identified by hats, / Wander in a maze of mannered brick”—but I couldn’t remember where it was from. I whispered the words to Siri, and she told me the answer.*
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Hofstra’s gym had been filled with folding tables, thirty rows deep. The space was officially called the Media Filing Center, but most people referred to it as Spin Alley. Every credentialed journalist had a seat, reserved by name, which came prestocked with an outlet strip, an Ethernet cable, and a brochure printed by Facebook, one of the debate’s sponsors. “Facebook is the new town hall,” the brochure said. “Be creative and go Live often!”
The walls of the gym were partitioned into backdrops—Fox News, Fox Business, FoxNewsGo—with an anchor standing in front of each one, staring into the middle distance. Everyone in the room was talking, simultaneously, to a different group of people who weren’t in the room. Two guys wearing glasses and skinny ties sat next to each other on canvas chairs. “Trade,” one of them said. “Trade’s gonna be huge tonight.” A woman filmed them with a phone, streaming their analysis to some platform or another, or to several platforms at once.
I ran into Lou Dobbs, who was wearing pancake makeup and sipping from a tiny bottle of water. Dobbs had been a star anchor on CNN for almost three decades. After 9/11, though, his rhetoric grew increasingly xenophobic, and CNN let him go in 2009. His current show, on Fox Business, was one of Donald Trump’s favorites.
I asked Dobbs if he’d heard of Cernovich. “Absolutely!” he said. “I follow him on Twitter. Seems very smart.”
We parted, then Dobbs chased me down. “Can I revise that?” he said. “I’m not sure I follow him.” (He did; they’d interacted on Twitter several times.) “I’ve seen his stuff, and I think it’s interesting,” he added. “Interesting is a good thing, right?”
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Cernovich texted me a screenshot of a map, showing me where he was, and I walked off campus to find him. He was marching with a few dozen Jill Stein supporters who were looking for a designated protest area. “Trying to get to the free speech zone,” he texted. “Police keep sending us to different areas. Some real psyops, man.” His theory was that the police, possibly following orders from the Democratic Party, were intentionally giving protesters the runaround, to sap their morale. As he walked, he filmed a Periscope video called “No free speech at #Debates2016.”
“Mainstream media’s not gonna talk about this,” he said.
The comments floated up the left side of the screen:
The cops are Soros people!
This country is a joke!
Harambe!
I gave up on trying to find Cernovich and got back to Spin Alley just in time for the debate. Cernovich, standing in an off-campus parking lot, watched it on his phone. In ninety minutes, Trump told thirty-four lies, a level of dishonesty that was, at the time, still surprising. “I hope the fact-checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard,” Clinton said.
“Sick Hillary is heavily medicated,” Cernovich tweeted. “She is struggling. Too much Xanax?”
When the debate was over, I found Cernovich in the parking lot. He was leaning against the hood of a car, still tweeting. Next to him was a fellow Twitter activist, a preppy-looking navy vet who exuded a manic intensity. “Jack Posobiec, Citizens for Trump,” he said, giving me a vigorous handshake.*
Posobiec had given Cernovich a ride to Long Island, and he now offered to take us both back to the city. As he drove, Posobiec said, “Objectively—or, as objective as I can be—I think it was a pretty even fight.”
“They both landed a few blows,” Cernovich said. “The most pathetic thing she did was keep whining about fact-checkers. Everyone hates the media, and she’s calling on them to white-knight for her? Looks weak.”
Trump had spent much of the debate sniffling audibly, and I asked Cernovich whether he worried about Trump’s health. “I wouldn’t focus on that,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they messed with his mic to make it sound like that.” He mentioned that, on Twitter, some of Trump’s critics were still harping on birtherism, “which is such a boring, basic-bitch story at this point.”
“It’s, like, guys, find a new narrative,” Posobiec said.
“The mainstream media has lost so much legitimacy at this point,” Cernovich said. “If they reported, ‘We just saw Trump beat the shit out of a guy on the street,’ skeptical people like my readers would go, ‘Really? Is there video? Was the video doctored?’” Traditional journalists would spin the debate in Clinton’s favor no matter what, he said; his counterspin was a necessary corrective. “The left likes to talk about power structures, right? Well, the media still thinks of itself as speaking truth to power. What they don’t realize is that someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate. Maybe they should check their structural privilege.”
In 2010, when Andrew Breitbart started a blog called Big Journalism, the name was ironic. In 2016, Breitbart got more traffic than the Los Angeles Times, and Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s editor-in-chief, stepped down to run a successful presidential campaign. Cernovich said, “Going by the statistics, I’m less influential than some people”—Trump, say, or Kim Kardashian—“but way more influential than some punk blogger at Politico or The Weekly Standard who thinks of himself as part of the media elite. Objectively, I am the new media.”*
We emerged from the Midtown Tunnel, and I asked Posobiec to drop me off at the nearest corner. “Bit of unsolicited advice?” Cernovich said before I got out of the car. “I saw your tweet earlier.” On the edge of campus, in a crowd of protesters, I had come upon two men—one wearing a My Little Pony leotard, the other wearing a knee-length galosh on his head—fighting over a rubber chicken. I tweeted a photo of them, along with the caption, “This is what democracy looks like.”
“That could have been a fire tweet,” Cernovich said. “Didn’t get a lot of pickup, though. Next time, maybe try a photo filter or a snappier caption.”
“OK,” I said, opening the car door.
“I see what you were going for, though,” Cernovich said. “You’ll get there.”
