Antisocial, p.31
Antisocial, page 31
Richard Spencer: Stop watching CNN. Stop watching Cernovich. . . . We need to be very strong and put forward this narrative. Mistakes were made, we’re gonna learn from this, but, morally speaking, no one did anything wrong.
Mike Enoch: We know the media is going to put a narrative out there. We know they’re gonna call us KKK, we know they’re gonna call us Nazis. . . . Your job, particularly if you have a presence, if you have a lot of followers, if you’re somebody with a voice that is heard, even if you’re somebody with only a hundred Twitter followers—put out our narrative, because every little bit helps.
Sven: We have gotten this far just letting people know and showing the hypocrisy and the lies of the media. And, every time, something like this gives these nervous Nellies an opportunity—
Mike Enoch: If CNN is black-pilling you, kill yourself!
Sven: Yes! People don’t believe CNN.
Mike Enoch: Normies don’t believe CNN!
Sven These people are operating under the fucking assumption that it’s, like, 1975 and CNN is—well, CNN didn’t exist then, but you know what I mean—that CBS is all there is, and everybody believes whatever they say.
Mike Enoch: Wolf Blitzer is not Walter Cronkite.
Closing sequence: a recording of Richard Nixon’s farewell address—“Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty”—played over the song “Adiós, Mi General,” an ode to Augusto Pinochet.
Interview with Faith Goldy
After Charlottesville, I spent a lot of time reading philosophy, getting down to first principles. There’s something amazing that happens when all the chattering classes are piling on you—“You’re a racist, you’re a neo-Nazi, you’re this, you’re that.” The result, in my case at least, is that you start to feel more emboldened. If that’s gonna be my reputation no matter what, maybe I should be less ambiguous about what I actually believe.
I think we’re at a juncture in our history where the West is going through an ideological crisis. My guess is that the dissident right, if you will, will continue to grow in numbers. You might see it publicly or it might happen behind the scenes, but I don’t think it can be contained once it’s started. Because what you have is an awakening of racial consciousness among white people. For some people, it’s going to lead to a place of white guilt. For others, it’s gonna be more like, “Hang on, what the hell do I have to feel guilty about?”
* * *
—
In the summer of 2018, Goldy announces her candidacy for mayor of Toronto. Out of thirty-five candidates, she finishes third, with 3.4 percent of the vote. The day she loses the election, she changes her Twitter bio from “Next Mayor of Toronto” to “Next Prime Minister of Canada.”
Interviews shortly after Charlottesville
Cassandra Fairbanks:
I refused to report from Charlottesville. Refused to go. Now, seeing what a mess it was, I clearly made the right call. People walking around with swastikas? Are you fucking kidding me? And that woman who died—I retweeted the GoFundMe campaign to raise money for her. It’s heartbreaking. At the same time, it’s also—I do think the media oversimplifies things. I’m sure there were people there, naïve teenagers or whoever, who didn’t necessarily know what they were getting into. ’Cause I’m seeing estimates that there were fifteen hundred people marching? I don’t think there are fifteen hundred actual Nazis in this country, I really don’t.
Jack Posobiec:
I thought the president got it exactly right. Two fringe groups, on both sides. The alt-left and the alt-right, both pushing their extreme racial identity politics. Except I don’t even consider those alt-right guys to be right wing, actually. Because what National Socialists ultimately want is big government, right?
Laura Loomer:
Honestly, we need to destroy the alt-right. I’m telling everyone else in the New Right, or the alt-light, or whatever we are: no more fence sitting. We need to get rid of these people. There are leftists on Twitter trying to dox anyone who showed their face in Charlottesville, and I fully support that. I don’t want anything violent to happen to them, but if their families find out? If their employers find out? Look, if you don’t want that to happen to you, maybe don’t show up at Nazi rallies.
Jeff Giesea:
The rally we saw at the Lincoln Memorial, whatever you might think of it, was at least fairly well staged. They got some iconic memes out of it, at least. The images I’m seeing from this just make them look like idiots.
Jack Murphy:
This is their downfall. They can’t recover from this.
Mike Cernovich:
If you study humanity, if you study patterns, none of this is surprising. All signs point toward further polarization. Hard left, hard right. I’ve been anticipating blood in the streets—not wanting it, but ready for it. To me, I’d be tempted to turn this into a narrative of “To what extent is the mainstream hoaxing fake-news media responsible for creating this atmosphere? You’ve got a few hundred of these idiots out there, and CNN’s making them famous—why, just to stoke racial tension?” So that’s maybe how I would spin it.
Will Chamberlain:
Appalling. Disgusting. Frightening. Contemptible.*
* * *
—
I watched the images spread across Twitter: hundreds of torches winding through the University of Virginia’s campus, the flames leaping into the night sky. It was late. I tried half sleeping, not sleeping, half reading, not reading. I opened my laptop in the middle of the night, pulled up a blank Word document, sat for a while in the pallid light of the screen. Closed the laptop. The same distended febrile feeling, suddenly unignorable again.
Was the Charlottesville rally newsworthy, in some objective sense, or would it have been better if the media and everyone else had looked the other way? This wasn’t a question with an answer; it wasn’t even really a question, not anymore. Was the abduction of Charles Lindbergh’s baby intrinsically newsworthy? What about O.J.’s car chase in the white Bronco, or Monica’s blue dress, or Obama’s birth certificate? Once something becomes an ur-text that the whole nation is reading simultaneously, the conversation shifts. It’s past time to wonder whether to say something. You just have to figure out what to say.
PART FIVE
The American Berserk
. . . into the indigenous American berserk . . . the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological . . .
Philip Roth, 1997
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Emptiness
I was on a southbound Amtrak, heading to D.C. to cover the DeploraBall, when I learned that Mike Enoch had been doxed.
The name was unfamiliar to most Americans, MSNBC viewers and Fox News viewers alike; but to an inner cadre of web-fluent neofascists, Enoch was an influential and divisive figure. An article on AltRight.com once lauded his “superlative talent as both an orator and a philosopher.” “Hate him or love him,” David Duke tweeted, “Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.”
Just three years prior, Enoch could be heard mocking the likes of Duke and Richard Spencer, criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before Enoch’s radicalization was complete. By the time Trump started running for president, Enoch was openly advocating for a white ethnostate, expressing “skepticism” about how many Jews had died in the Holocaust, and referring to African Americans as “chimps” and “savages.” Liberals who claimed to have compassion for undocumented children were “full of shit,” Enoch explained, “particularly when it’s coming out of the mouths of these smarmy Jews. You’re not a compassionate group of people. You’re one of the most selfish, vindictive groups of people on the face of the fucking planet.” He didn’t self-identify as a neo-Nazi, but not because he saw anything wrong with it. “LARPing like it’s 1940s Germany isn’t my thing,” he said at one point. “I think we need a nationalism that’s symbolically in line with our time and place. But if one of our guys wants to do the swastika bit, whatever, I’m not gonna countersignal that.”
He granted interviews to alt-right-friendly outlets but eschewed encounters with the mainstream media, or tried to turn those encounters to his advantage. When a CNN reporter called him to ask for an on-camera interview, he recorded the phone call, subjecting her to several minutes of painfully awkward banter, before rejecting her request: “Why would I let somebody else twist my words when I am fully capable of getting my message out myself?” He preferred to speak—volubly, articulately, vindictively—on his own podcast, The Daily Shoah. The title was a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central. Like much of Enoch’s material, the pun could be interpreted either as a breathtakingly repugnant affront or simply as an edgy meme.
The Daily Shoah had a rotating cast of cohosts, most of whom used pseudonyms: Sven, Toilet Law, Ebolamericana, Death. “Mike Enoch” was a pseudonym, too. Over the years, he occasionally dropped hints about his identity, although he was careful not to reveal too much. He said that he lived with his wife in New York City—“which narrows it down to me and eight million other people”—and that he worked at a normie day job, which he would surely lose if his employers ever learned of his alter ego. His parents were “shitlibs,” and they’d trained him to be one, too; as a child, they’d sent him to church camps and public schools, where he’d been “programmed” to believe in racial equality and the brotherhood of man. “If you’re a liberal, you’ve never thought twice, you’ve never reconsidered, you’ve absorbed what you were taught in the government schools and by the TV,” he wrote. But he was one of the few who’d been able to subvert the programming. After years of struggle, he had learned how to think his way out of the Narrative.
* * *
—
When Enoch’s identity was revealed, Salon posted an article about it. I tried to open the article on my laptop, but the wi-fi on the train was painfully slow, and the article was laden with pop-up ads and autoplay videos, so it took several minutes to load. While I waited, I tried to open Enoch’s blog, The Right Stuff, in another tab. I was in a window seat; sitting in the aisle seat next to me was a middle-aged woman. Sweater, reading glasses, bangs: a suburban professional, if I had to guess, maybe an optometrist from Bethesda or a professor at a local college. I angled my screen toward the window, a movement I now made so often, in so many public places, that I often did it without thinking.
The wi-fi went out. I started streaming an episode of The Daily Shoah on my phone instead. The suburban professional was reading a paperback novel about a beach house, several generations of women, and whether the mistakes of the past can ever be forgiven. Two feet away from her, in my earbuds, Mike Enoch was talking about gassing the kikes and turning their skin into lampshades.
He was joking. Was he joking? Clearly, he was not issuing an imminent and credible threat to put specific Jews inside an extant gas chamber. Still, it felt like a stretch to call it a joke, not only because it wasn’t funny but also because it didn’t have the structure of a joke. It was more like a meme. “How long have we been shitposting for at this point?” one of the cohosts asked.
That’s precisely what it was: shitposting. The podcast was a 4chan board come to life, full of naughty words and obscure allusions and meta-ironic gas-chamber memes. The purpose of all the shitposting, beyond the usual trolling and triggering of the libs, seemed to be to desensitize the listener over time—to say the unsayable again and again, until grisly hatred came to seem like just another thing on the internet.
The wi-fi came back on, stronger this time, and the Salon article finally finished loading. A group of Antifa-affiliated vigilante journalists, possibly working in collaboration with disgruntled alt-right tipsters, had revealed that Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a computer programmer who worked at a New York e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue with the caption “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial. Of all the details included in the dox, perhaps the most baffling of all was that Mike’s wife was Jewish.
* * *
—
The Antifa vigilantes had published two email addresses, both purportedly belonging to Peinovich. Antifa activists often argue that doxing is a legitimate response to an inherently violent ideology, that by espousing fascist views one effectively forfeits the right to privacy. I am opposed to doxing in most cases—I worry about false positives, slippery slopes, the pernicious allure of retributivism—but not opposed enough, apparently, to overcome my journalistic curiosity. I emailed both addresses.
Peinovich responded right away. He said that he didn’t want to talk—“I have a platform to tell my story that is bigger than yours”—and yet, every time I sent another email, he answered it almost immediately. I made no secret of the fact that I found his views repugnant, but I added, truthfully, that I wanted to know how he’d ended up in his predicament and what he planned to do next. He replied with memes or flippant one-liners.* I drafted a long, intricate note, trying to persuade him to talk to me for a magazine piece. His entire response was, “You seem kinda mad.” We went back and forth like that for a while, but I had no real success in drawing him out, and eventually we both lost interest.
A few days later, he read our full exchange on The Daily Shoah. To his credit, he didn’t edit his responses to make them sound smarter. But he didn’t have to. According to the rules of online debate as explained in The Essential TRS Troll Guide, which I hadn’t read at the time, Peinovich had won by default, simply by writing fewer words and maintaining his ironic detachment, while I had made a rookie mistake: letting myself get triggered into displaying emotion. After the podcast aired, I got a few nasty Twitter messages from alt-right trolls with names like Helicopter Pilot and The G0yim Kn0w, which was unpleasant but hardly unprecedented. I figured that was the end of it.
Then I heard back from the other email address. “I am not the Mike Peinovich to whom you addressed this email, but I am his father,” it read. “My son has distanced himself from our family over the last few years, and, until two days ago, I was totally unaware of his ‘alt-right’ activities. . . . I am struggling to understand how Mike E. (which is what we call him to distinguish him from me and my father who was also Mike Peinovich) could have said, posted or tweeted the things that are attributed to him.”
I called Mike Sr. and we talked for a long time. It was the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, and he sounded weary and a bit dazed, the way a lot of liberals did in those days. “Our family is pretty well integrated into the normal American stream,” he said. “We tried to give our kids good values. Mike E. went to good schools, and he loved being part of his church youth group.” The Peinoviches lived in Montclair, an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that was often listed among the most progressive towns in the country. “We knew that he was an outspoken Trump supporter, and he was very much the only one in the family,” Mike Sr. went on, “so we agreed, at a certain point, not to talk about politics.”
After the dox, he tried listening to The Daily Shoah. He lasted a few minutes, long enough to recognize his son’s voice and profane sense of humor, before turning it off. “The Mike E. I know is a thoughtful guy, a moral guy,” he said. “But I guess I don’t know him like I thought I did.” He was reticent to say more. For a few months, we left it at that.
* * *
• • •
I added The Daily Shoah to my regular podcast rotation. The internet was teeming with weirdos and extremists; I tried to keep up with most of them, or as many as I could, given that they each seemed to produce about forty-five minutes of content for every waking hour. I watched Jack Posobiec on Periscope speaking mediocre Mandarin while noodling on his bass. I watched Laura Loomer on YouTube protesting sharia law by covering the Fearless Girl statue with a burqa. Once, when I was getting ready to wash some dishes, I saw a push notification on my phone: Will Chamberlain was starting a Periscope. I clicked the link, put the phone in my pocket, and began scrubbing. “Hey, Marantz is watching!” I heard Chamberlain say through my earbuds. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What’s new?” He and his thousands of viewers waited in silence as I rushed around my kitchen looking for a hand towel. Finally, I managed to type something in the comments, and he moved on. I made a mental note: from now on, watch Periscopes only after they’re finished.
While taking out the recycling, I watched Tim Pool searching for nonexistent “no-go zones” in Sweden. While biking laps around Prospect Park, I listened to Mike Cernovich explaining why he’d granted 60 Minutes an interview, and how he’d been shrewd enough to turn an attempted gotcha piece on its head. I tried to click on most of Alex Jones’s push alerts, but his relentless wolf-crying—“Breaking! Plan to Assassinate Trump Leaked”—was hell on my phone’s feeble battery.
I also listened to the prolific podcaster Stefan Molyneux, who called himself a “philosopher in the tradition of Socrates.” (The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] described him as an “alleged cult leader.”) Like Lauren Southern and Gavin McInnes, Molyneux was careful to avoid open endorsements of white nationalism, but he was constantly creeping up to the line. He didn’t shout; he didn’t use racist slurs; he simply explained, in an imperious, pan-Anglophonic accent, how Europeans had evolved to be more intelligent than Africans, and why it was such a shame that the world wouldn’t give white people a fair shake.*
