Antisocial, p.27
Antisocial, page 27
Then came Trump. Twerp bashing was still good fun, but it now raised an urgent and vertiginous set of questions. TV news—especially the postlapsarian twenty-four-hour version, dominated by horse-race politics and missing planes and viral outrage—was bad enough. What if it was replaced by something incomparably worse?
* * *
• • •
After they cleared security, Hoft and Wintrich walked past the North Lawn and into the briefing room and gave each other a high five. That they had actually made it inside seemed incredible even to them. Hoft, sitting in a blue folding chair, sent a message to his niece: “This is your favorite uncle texting you from the White House!!!!” followed by a string of emoji hearts and kisses.
When the president hosts a visiting head of state for a bilateral press conference, the event is often held not in the briefing room but in the East Room, the closest thing the White House has to a Versailles-style ballroom. Today, the briefing room was being used as a holding pen, essentially, a place for the reporters to gather until the staff was ready to escort them to the main event. The podium was empty. Hoft and Wintrich stepped behind the lectern, with the official White House seal in the background. They posed for a furtive photo, grinning and making the “OK” hand gesture—thumb and forefinger forming a circle, three fingers in the air. When they sat down again, Wintrich posted the photo on Facebook, captioning it with two emojis, an American flag and a frog.
Like Pepe the Frog, with which it was sometimes associated, the OK hand gesture was a meme that had mutated quickly. Around that time, anonymous posters on 4chan were spreading the rumor that the gesture was an obscure symbol for white power. This was later revealed to be a hoax.* The channers went on to pull the same trick with a series of other signifiers—the peace sign, Facebook’s thumbs-up icon, glasses of milk. Part of the goal was to gaslight the normies, to make them doubt even their simplest perceptions. Everything was open to interpretation. Even what looked like clear evidence of avowed hatred could turn out to be a deepfake, or an in-joke shrouded in endless layers of ambiguity.
The news story of the day was Flynn’s alleged ties to Russia. So far, Trump had said nothing about it, not even on Twitter. In a few minutes, he would face the White House press corps on live TV. It was a scenario out of a journalism textbook: an opportunity to hold the president’s feet to the fire, to ask what the scandal indicated about his administration.
Hoft and Wintrich, oblivious of the mounting tension, continued to hone their questions about Castro. Hoft chatted amiably with a French correspondent, who asked which organization he was with. “A big website in the Midwest called The Gateway Pundit,” he said. “Very, very large.”
“Oh, you’re from the Midwest—that’s why you’re so friendly,” she said.
The reporters were escorted down a white marble hallway lined with oil portraits of recent presidents and first ladies. “Holy shit, Lucian, look at this,” Hoft said, standing in front of a portrait of Hillary Clinton. Hoft and Wintrich posed in front of the portrait, making the OK gesture. Then they proceeded down the hallway, passing a marble bust of Abraham Lincoln and a grand piano inlaid with gold leaf. “Amazing,” Hoft said, under his breath. For the moment, he seemed sincere.
In the East Room, unlike in the briefing room, the White House dictates the seating arrangement for the American press. On each gold-colored chair was a piece of printer paper bearing the name of an outlet: The New York Times next to the Christian Broadcasting Network, the AP next to Breitbart. Hoft and Wintrich couldn’t find any seats for The Gateway Pundit, so they took the ones reserved for Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatari government, and RT, which is funded by the Russian government. “Everyone calls us Putin’s puppets anyway, so we might as well embrace it,” Hoft said.
Six TV correspondents—Kristen Welker of NBC News, and five broad-shouldered men—stood on wooden risers, their backs to the podium, waiting to go live. The room got quiet as the president’s arrival drew near. The correspondents faced their respective cameras and began to speak—first, one at a time, then all at once, like an orchestra tuning up before a concert:
“. . . I would be surprised if he doesn’t get some questions about . . .”
“. . . does the president still have confidence in his national security adviser . . .”
“. . . apparently had discussions with the Russian ambassador . . .”
“. . . Flynn is in hot water . . .”
The first journalist Trump called on was Scott Thuman, of the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group. He asked a softball question about Trump’s relationship with Trudeau, given their “philosophical differences.” Trump’s second and final question went to Kaitlan Collins, a 24-year-old reporter with The Daily Caller. This was the press corps’s last chance to bring up the Flynn scandal. Instead, Collins asked, “What do you see as the most important national security matters facing us?” In person, some of the correspondents were unable to mask their displeasure; on Twitter, the reactions were even stronger. Hunter Walker, of Yahoo News, tweeted, from inside the East Room, “Hearing reporters gripe about the lack of Flynn questions now: ‘I’m just embarrassed for us.’” For a little while, Collins and Walker engaged in a brief public spat, tweeting barbed remarks at each other from different parts of the White House. Later that day, one of Collins’s colleagues at The Daily Caller compiled Walker’s comments, and those of other correspondents, in a post headlined “7 Butthurt Reporters Who Should Be Deported.”
* * *
• • •
Back in his room at the Hay-Adams, Hoft was having a conversation, on speakerphone, with a Gateway Pundit staffer who was pitching a story: “I’m hearing that either Priebus or Spicer could be the next to hear ‘You’re fired.’”
Hoft wasn’t interested. “Unless you can frame it as ‘Media Sharks Circling for Blood,’ some angle like that,” he said.
Wintrich was curled up on the bed with his laptop, in a swoon of self-googling. Media Matters, a left-wing nonprofit, had published the photo of Hoft and Wintrich behind the lectern, along with a lengthy blog post headlined “A Dangerous Troll Is Now Reporting from the White House.” Wintrich had since received offers to appear on Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. The New York Times published a piece about him—“White House Grants Press Credentials to a Pro-Trump Blog”—and a few hours later Wintrich filed his rebuttal: “Carlos Slim’s Anti-Trump Blog, ‘The New York Times,’ Attacks Gateway Pundit.”
Hoft and Wintrich took an elevator to the basement of the Hay-Adams, where there was a bar called Off the Record, a hangout for White House staffers and political reporters. Hoft ran into an old acquaintance, Sam Nunberg, a former employee of the Trump campaign. “I’m going to see Steve later,” Nunberg boasted. He meant Bannon. “I’ve got some Israel policy guys I want him to meet.”
“Oh, neat, I was just talking to Steve,” Hoft countered. “He’s been reading our stuff, says it’s better than ever.” They parted, their status competition having reached an impasse. Hoft ordered a lemonade and took a phone call from Julia Hahn, who had been Bannon’s protégée at Breitbart before going to work with him in the White House. “Jim’s a kooky guy, but he does have influence, you can’t argue with that,” Nunberg said. “Just look at how many times Trump’s tweeted out a Gateway link, or referenced them in his speeches.”
That night, Flynn resigned, resulting in a blizzard of headlines. Neither Hoft nor Wintrich noticed right away—Hoft was on a flight back to St. Louis, and Wintrich was engaged in a Twitter battle with a left-wing reporter at Mic. Before Hoft left for the airport, I told him that he should expect to hear from one of The New Yorker’s eighteen full-time fact-checkers. “Oh yeah, just like at The Gateway Pundit,” Hoft said. “We’ve got a huge department of full-time fact-checkers.” He laughed so hard at his own joke that he nearly spilled his lemonade.
* * *
—
After Hoft and Wintrich left, I spent a while at the bar with Nunberg. He wore a pocket square and gold skull-shaped cufflinks; his hair was slicked back; his suit, shirt, and tie all had pinstripes in clashing colors and sizes. He looked like a well-fed bar mitzvah boy whose reception theme was The Wolf of Wall Street. Nunberg, who described Roger Stone as his political mentor and “surrogate father,” had been fired by the Trump campaign in 2015, when it emerged that Nunberg had once written Facebook posts in which he referred to Obama as a “Socialist Marxist Islamo Fascist Nazi Appeaser,” and to Al Sharpton’s daughter as a “N–––!”*
Off the Record’s leather-bound menu included a list of special election-themed cocktails: the Kainehattan, the Pence’s Tea Party, the Hillary’s Last Word, the Trumpy Sour. Each cocktail cost eighteen dollars or more. This was insane, considering that journalism was a dying industry; still, it was the going rate for insider gossip, and everyone paid it. For the previous hour, Nunberg had been talking, loquaciously and at an indiscreet volume, to a local reporter while drinking on her tab. When she got up to leave, he started drinking on mine. During the handoff, Nunberg excused himself to “take a leak.” “Have fun with him,” the reporter said. “He’s a weirdo and a hopeless exaggerator, but he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.”
This air of world-weariness was as much a part of the place as the sconces and the moldings. The prevailing attitude was that D.C. was a swamp, a clusterfuck, a clown car inching through gridlock; you were expected to roll your eyes at the situation, make a cynical joke about it, and get on with your business. You couldn’t, without being a buzzkill, express too much earnest curiosity as to where the clown car was headed, or whether it might one day hurtle off a cliff. Trump was just another lout, another grifter—in other words, another politician. His caricature was already framed and hanging on the wall, near a scowling Dick Cheney and a jug-eared Obama—all of them, side by side, on the same plane.
Nunberg returned to his barstool, ordered another drink, and introduced himself to me for the third time. “So whaddaya wanna know?” he said. He gave me a preview of his wares. He could offer salacious rumors about which White House staffer was “next on the chopping block,” or about whether Bannon and Preibus were allies or nemeses, or about what Jared and Ivanka were really after. “This one you can use on deep background,” he kept saying, or, “That’ll have to be from ‘a source familiar.’”
He was doling out information that was supposed to be valuable, but I couldn’t make any use of it. I felt like I was being led into a bank vault full of a foreign currency that I had no way to exchange. For one thing, very little of what Nunberg said would be relevant in a month or two, after the allegiances in the White House had shifted and many of the current staffers had been fired. For another thing, Nunberg was plainly willing to flatter, to self-contradict, to stretch the limits of credulity—he seemed more interested in bad-mouthing his rivals, or in keeping himself entertained, than in any consistent version of the truth. At one point, I mentioned a telling detail I’d just read in a magazine profile of a Trump administration official; Nunberg strongly hinted that he’d been the source for the detail, and that he’d made it up, for fun. I felt confident that, given enough time and a profligate enough bar tab, I could get him to say anything about anyone. It was like a Zen koan: If a source familiar says something patently false, but it’s true that he said it, is the quote worth writing down?*
* * *
• • •
The day after Kaitlan Collins and Hunter Walker’s Twitter feud, they sat near the back of the briefing room, chatting nonchalantly. April Ryan arrived fashionably late, removing her sunglasses, and people stood to let her get to her seat. Just before the briefing was to begin, a short nineteen-year-old named Kyle Mazza darted across the room, staking out a prime position in an aisle near the front. Mazza was a new-media Goyal, a floater among floaters. He was the sole employee of a network he called UNF News, or Universal News Forever (News), which owned no bandwidth on TV or radio—just a skeletal, sporadically updated website.
A sliding door opened, and Spicer approached the lectern. Apart from camera shutters, the room fell silent. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said. “I can sense the love in the room.”
He called on Jonathan Karl of ABC. “Can you still say definitively that nobody on the Trump campaign, not even General Flynn, had any contact with the Russians before the election?” Karl asked.
“I don’t have any—there’s nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period,” Spicer said.
The next day, the podium in the briefing room was cordoned off with a velvet rope and a placard: “Photos may be taken at ground level only.” Evidently, someone in the White House press office had noticed the photo of Hoft and Wintrich behind the lectern. I took a picture of the placard and texted it to both of them.
“HAHAHAHAHAHA,” Wintrich texted back.
“Is that photoshopped?” Hoft responded. “Real?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Very Professional and Very Good
The other Deplorables noticed what an impression Wintrich was making in Washington, and the White House briefing room soon became a fire hydrant that no alt-light figurehead could resist marking. Mike Cernovich and Cassandra Fairbanks got temporary passes; they took a photo of themselves behind the lectern, making the OK hand gesture. Afterward, they stood in the aisle to watch that day’s briefing. For half an hour, live on Periscope, Fairbanks filmed Cernovich trying and failing to ask Spicer a question. When Spicer finished and left the podium, Cernovich shouted after him, “What about violence against Trump supporters?” Spicer kept walking out of the room. Cernovich turned and repeated his question, now directing it to the correspondents in the blue folding seats. “Why will nobody here cover the violence against Trump supporters?” he said. “This is being completely covered up.”
Most of the correspondents ignored him, the way they might ignore a stranger shouting obscenities on the Metro. “Are you a reporter, sir?” April Ryan asked.
“I am, madam,” Cernovich responded. “I’m a reporter, I’m a documentary filmmaker.”
He and Fairbanks filed out of the room, brushing past Jonathan Karl. Fairbanks kept streaming, and Cernovich kept narrating for the camera. “Let ’em get mad,” he said. “I definitely just had a question. Definitely had a question. Journalism. So this is good.”
A few weeks later, Jack Posobiec, then the sole employee of the Rebel’s D.C. bureau, got a White House press pass. “We’ve just come through security,” Posobiec announced as he walked toward the West Wing. “This is truly hallowed ground we’re walking on right now.” When he reached the briefing room, he posed for a photo while making the OK hand gesture.
Jerome Corsi, the bestselling author of Where’s the Birth Certificate?, had since left WND for Infowars—the tinfoil-hat equivalent of a star Time reporter being poached by Newsweek. During a lull in activity, Corsi stood on the podium in the briefing room, livestreaming from an iPad. “Very compact facility,” he told an Infowars anchor filling in for Alex Jones. “We’re going to be here on a regular basis.”*
The substitute anchor, live on air, started interviewing Corsi in the usual Infowars style, stipulating the importance of “defeating the Deep State coup d’état, silencing the mainstream media.”
Corsi, obviously uncomfortable, tried to cut the interview short. Apparently, everyone could hear both sides of this conversation as it blared over his iPad. He asked to continue the interview another time, “so we don’t have to broadcast everything we’re saying to the entire press room.”
* * *
—
The first alt-light figure to make news simply by entering the briefing room was Milo Yiannopoulos, who attended a press briefing in 2016, near the end of the Obama administration. Briefings then were so sparsely attended that he was able to sit, flanked by two Breitbart reporters. He even got to ask a question. “It’s becoming very clear that Twitter and Facebook, in particular, are censoring and punishing conservative and libertarian points of view,” Yiannopoulos said. “Is there anything the president can do to encourage Silicon Valley—to remind them of the importance, the critical importance, of open, free speech in our society?”*
Eight weeks earlier, Twitter had deverified Yiannopoulos’s account. The company wouldn’t say why it took this disciplinary action, but it happened shortly after Yiannopoulos tweeted, to one of his many antagonists, “You deserve to be harassed you social justice loser.” Yiannopoulos engaged in this sort of discourse constantly, and social networks rarely reprimanded him. When they did, it had less to do with the First Amendment per se than with the fact that all social networks have rules, and that Yiannopoulos repeatedly violated them.
For three minutes, Yiannopoulos and Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, engaged in a civil debate. By the standards of a press briefing, it was almost scholarly. Yiannopoulos insisted that speech rights must be protected above all else, which had been his hobbyhorse for years. Whenever I was tempted to conclude that he was a nihilistic troll with no core beliefs, I had to correct myself: he did seem to have at least one. “All I care about is free speech and free expression,” he said. “I want people to be able to be, do, and say anything.”
Then I found a column from 2012, before Yiannopoulos became Twitter famous. The headline was “The Internet Is Turning Us All into Sociopaths.” “Social media,” he wrote, was encouraging people “to write unspeakable things to other human beings that we would never dream of saying in person. . . . It’s as if a psychological norm is being established whereby comments left online are part of a video game and not real life.” The Yiannopoulos of 2012, it turned out, was far from a free-speech absolutist. “It’s clear that existing hate speech laws are inadequate for the social media era,” he wrote. “We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others,” he wrote. “Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?”
