Antisocial, p.32
Antisocial, page 32
I only listened to The Daily Shoah on headphones. There was a child in the house, after all.
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After Mike Enoch got doxed and lost his source of income, he doubled down on white nationalism. He spoke at almost every public alt-right event—the April rally in Pikeville, the May rally in Charlottesville, the June rally in D.C. On August 12, when the big Charlottesville rally was shut down, a few of the people who’d planned to speak reconvened in another park, two miles away. Enoch stood on a wooden riser in the shade of a dogwood tree, surrounded by small concentric circles of reporters, protesters, and counterprotesters. He wore aviator sunglasses, a slight beard, and the unofficial uniform of the day: khakis and a white polo shirt. “Have we heard this conspiracy theory of white privilege?” he said. “This is a concept that was brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves.” He finished his remarks and introduced the next speaker, David Duke. An hour later, James Alex Fields, wearing khakis and a white polo, drove a car into a crowd of people.
Mike Peinovich Sr. spent that Saturday at home. He made breakfast and mowed the lawn. At some point, as he did every day, he sat down to read The New York Times. On page A12 was a photograph of a torch-wielding mob, taken in Charlottesville the previous night. He looked at the picture for a long time, but he didn’t see Mike Enoch anywhere. “Thank God,” he said, and went about his day.
The next day, when he got home from church, he opened his email and saw that a relative had sent him a YouTube link. He clicked on it: his son and David Duke, standing shoulder to shoulder beneath a dogwood tree. That night, he called me again and asked if I still wanted to talk.
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• • •
Three days later, I took a train to visit Mike Sr. and his wife, Billie, in Montclair. They lived in an Arts and Crafts house on a tree-lined block near the center of town. As I walked there from the train station, I saw, through the window of a restaurant, a TV tuned to CNN. The chyron read, “Cities Bracing for Rallies; White Nationalists Emboldened After Trump Remarks.” Two blocks later, I passed a young couple, a pregnant woman in a sundress and a guy with a man bun. “So let me get this straight,” the woman was saying. “The police didn’t have riot gear, but the fucking hate groups did?”
Mike Sr. answered the door. He was taller and thinner than his son, with gray hair and rimless glasses, but I saw the resemblance right away: the square jaw, the downturned mouth. I also noticed an unfortunate coincidence, which I didn’t have the temerity to mention: he was wearing khakis and a white polo, the same clothes that the white supremacists in Charlottesville had worn in order to look like normal, nonthreatening Americans.
Billie and Mike were retired, and they spent several months a year traveling. They gave me a tour of the house, telling stories about items they’d collected: Persian rugs, Mexican pottery, a floor-mounted globe. Mike was once a professor of Old English at the University of Pennsylvania, and his study contained several dictionaries and translations of Beowulf, along with contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. We sat in leather armchairs in the living room, and he talked at length about his ancestors. “My grandfather helped drive the KKK out of North Dakota,” he said. “My other grandfather came from Yugoslavia, fleeing religious persecution. My dad was a fighter pilot during World War II.” At first this seemed like an icebreaker—an amateur genealogist sharing his findings. But as he repeated these facts several times throughout our conversation, I realized that he was trying to clear his family name.
Mike Enoch’s parents split up when he was three, and Billie married into the family a few years later. As far as she was concerned, she was as much Mike Enoch’s parent as anyone. She was a psychiatric social worker for many years, and she spoke in the language of therapy. “I feel shock and anger,” she said. “I also feel shame, which is irrational, because I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. I think he brought this on himself because he wants to distance himself from us, from everyone, as a form of self-protection.” Then, more quietly, she said, “He must be so lonely.”
They still weren’t sure how to explain the situation to their friends and family. “What do you do?” Billie said. “Send a letter to your cousins—‘Haven’t spoken to you in twenty years, hope you’re doing well, and, oh, P.S., our son’s a Nazi now’?” She worried that people would wonder how she and Mike Sr. had failed as parents. “Everyone wants it to be simple, to know who to blame,” one of Mike Enoch’s relatives told me later. “But lots of kids have parents who get divorced when they’re young. Lots of white kids have difficult personalities. They don’t all become Nazis.”
A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike Enoch as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a history of abuse, a chemical imbalance—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But his conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling. Somehow, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where many of the worst ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise.
* * *
• • •
As a child, Mike Enoch suffered from severe eczema and asthma. In most old photographs, his face is red and swollen and his shoulders are hunched, a sign that he is straining to catch his breath. The Peinoviches spent one summer at a lake house in Ohio, where the air was fresh and Mike Enoch found it easier to breathe. Still, he went swimming with his shirt on, because his skin was covered with scratches and open sores. “When we walked through an airport or a mall with our younger son, we would get stopped and told what a beautiful child we had,” Billie said. “Not with Mike E.” He was so allergic to so many things—dust, pollen, nuts, shellfish—that he carried an EpiPen almost everywhere he went. At birthday parties, while the other children ate ice cream and cake, he ate saltines.*
In 1980, Mike Enoch’s mother left Mike Sr. for a family friend, and she later moved out of state. The divorce was ugly, and for many years she rarely saw the children. Mike Enoch was sent to a series of therapists, who mentioned potential disorders but nothing definitive. One therapist, instead of giving a diagnosis, said that Mike Enoch was “as vulnerable as a peeled grape.”
Gradually, he learned to insulate himself with jokes and insults. He was witty and clever—everyone agreed that he was the smartest person in the family—and he found strength in contrarianism. His ideology shifted over time, but his approach was always the same: exposing and attacking the flaws in consensus thinking, often without any sense of proportion. “He strikes me as someone without a core,” one of his relatives told me, “who only knows how to oppose and who chooses his positions based on what will be most upsetting to people around him.” When he was in fifth grade, his class was asked to wear red, white, and blue in honor of Memorial Day. Mike Enoch made a point of wearing orange and green instead. “It wasn’t a political statement,” Billie said. “He was expressing contempt for their rules.”
He grew up listening to the Jerky Boys, virtuosos of the scatological prank call, and to Opie and Anthony, a pair of bawdy afternoon-radio comedians who always seemed to be daring their station managers to fire them. Opie and Anthony, in particular, reveled in boundary pushing for its own sake. For several years, they held a Most Offensive Song Contest; crowd favorites included “Baby Raper” and “Stuck in an Oven with Jews.” Anyone who didn’t enjoy the joke was urged to grow a thicker skin. When the internet came along, most of the shock jocks migrated online, where they no longer had station managers who could fire them; the gatekeepers were more distant, and more permissive. If “Stuck in an Oven with Jews” was shocking prior to social media, the race to the bottom would soon accelerate into free fall.*
Mike Enoch went to a public high school that was academically rigorous and ethnically diverse—mostly African American kids and white kids, and some whose parents had emigrated from Asia or South America. He had the sort of grades that are common among smart but disobedient kids: As in classes that interested him, Ds and Fs when he was bored or felt that the teacher didn’t deserve his respect. He smoked a lot of weed and went to a lot of Phish shows. Once, he and a friend got pulled over while hotboxing a car, and the friend was arrested for marijuana possession; but his father was a big-shot lawyer, and he pulled some strings to get his son’s case thrown out. Mike Enoch knew that the system was unfair, but he was still shocked at how clear-cut the inequity was: a poor black kid, or even a middle-class biracial kid like his brother, probably would have been treated far worse. He complained about this to his parents, who were heartened to see that he was developing a sense of social justice.
He went to Ohio University to study graphic design, but dropped out after the first quarter. He transferred to the main campus of Rutgers, and then to the Newark campus, but he hated it—the professors were tyrants who demanded blind obedience even when they didn’t know what they were talking about—and he spent most of his free time in his dorm room, alone, eating fast food and messing around on his computer. After leaving Rutgers, he took a few computer-programming classes at Pace University, but left without a degree. “Mike E. took his fourth run at college and finally faced the fact that he is not suited to academic life,” the family’s 2006 Christmas letter read. He moved to Bushwick, in Brooklyn, where he lived in a shared apartment with a bunch of struggling musicians and artists and activists. By default, they all considered themselves somewhere to the left of liberal, maybe closer to anarchist—but they spent most of their free time going to dive bars or house parties, not talking about politics.
Using tutorials online, he taught himself to code. Eventually, he was hired as a back-end programmer at AOL. “Though he commutes into Manhattan to a corporate job,” the family Christmas letter continued, “he’s still the non-conformist that he always was.”
* * *
• • •
His supervisor at AOL was a blonde woman from the Midwest, an amateur musician and photographer who shared many of his interests—sci-fi movies, medieval history, recondite internet humor. They started dating. She kept an active Flickr account, posting impressionistic nature photos and live-action shots from local rock shows, and she often talked about a fantasy novel she hoped to write one day. Her father was born Jewish and her mother had converted to Judaism, but Mike Enoch hardly found this remarkable. Half the people he grew up with were Jewish, including his high-school girlfriend.
He and the supervisor got married. (Their wedding ceremony was mostly secular, but they acknowledged their Episcopalian and Jewish roots by reciting an ecumenical prayer and stomping on a glass.) They moved to a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. To get his eczema under control, Mike Enoch ordered large doses of prednisone, a prescription steroid, from an Indian website, and took it without medical supervision. He gained so much weight that he was almost unrecognizable, and he went temporarily blind in one eye, necessitating emergency cataract surgery. In addition to weight gain and vision problems, the side effects were supposed to include depression and agitation. People told him to be careful, but he felt no more or less agitated than usual. He didn’t love being fat, but it was worth it. The pills were the only thing that made him feel better, so he took the pills.
They knew no one in their new neighborhood. They sometimes went back to Bushwick to see their old friends on the weekends, but not often. Eventually, they stopped going out much at all. Bars were too loud and expensive, and no one had anything interesting to say anyway. Instead, they stayed home, playing video games or reading separately on their laptops. Mike Enoch spent hours in political-debate forums on Facebook, letting his contrarian side run wild. No one was keeping track of what he said. No one even knew his name, or what he looked like. He might test out a whole range of opinions on a given topic, not yet sure which one he actually believed. Other times, for fun, he would stake out a seemingly indefensible position, then see if he could invent an argument to back it up. It felt like another video game.
He would join a debate forum, get banned for stirring up trouble, and then find a new one. The internet was full of them: subreddits like r/PoliticalDiscussion, Facebook groups like Atheism+ and Left vs. Right. Whatever people were arguing about, he’d find a way to insinuate himself into the argument. He loved good-faith debates: if you won, it was intrinsically gratifying, and if you lost, your ideas got sharper. He loved bad-faith debates, too: once you learned to read people, it wasn’t hard to predict which arguments (or shitposts, or non-sequitur memes) were most likely to infuriate them. When you made your opponents so flustered that they had to leave the forum, that was called a rage-quit. Mike Enoch started racking up rage-quits the way other people collected hunting trophies. Sometimes, in the shower, he would act out some made-up debate without even realizing what he was doing. “Who were you talking to in there?” his wife would ask when he got out.
“For a while, before the internet, liberals just had mainstream TV and newspaper news,” he said later. This led to groupthink just as surely as Coke and Taco Bell led to obesity. “It kind of came to a head during the Bush years,” he continued. “The feedback loop of liberal outrage—like, they were collectively driven insane.” He didn’t know the right way to talk about politics, but this facile water-cooler consensus was clearly the wrong way. If he wanted to find something better, he would have to do what he had always done in the past: throw out everything he’d been taught and start from scratch.
Everyone in the normal world seemed paralyzed by a desire for social acceptance. They weren’t really trying to pursue the truth, because there were so many thoughts they wouldn’t even allow themselves to think. At home with his wife, or on the debate forums, he was free to argue from first principles. It was obvious to him that the country was profoundly off track, and that both major political parties were morally and intellectually bankrupt. The only question was which utopian system should replace the current one.
He read books by Noam Chomsky and articles on Antiwar.com, which published critiques of American foreign policy from the far left and the far right. He dabbled in leftist anarchism for a while, and then in revolutionary Trotskyism. One Saturday, he later wrote, he found himself at a meeting “in a rundown YMCA in Brooklyn with a group of middle-aged Jewish public-school teachers.” They were discussing what stance to take on Islamic terrorism—it was awful, but at least it was anti-imperialist. “An overwhelming sense of loathing washed over me like an awesome wave,” he wrote. “The people I was around suddenly seemed twisted and horrible. A revelatory religious experience is the closest thing I can compare this experience to.”
He set out to find the “direct opposite” of Marxism, whatever that was. He remembered that a member of his Trotskyist group had described a trio of midcentury libertarian writers—Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises—as particularly “dangerous,” so Mike Enoch downloaded some of their books online to see what they were about.* “I tore through Mises’s tome ‘Socialism’ in about a week,” he wrote later. “And every one of those words rang true like it was written in my soul.” Mises wrote in a dense academic style, but his underlying premise was simple enough: only the free market could provide prosperity and freedom. His students later fleshed out the premise, arguing that government regulations and entitlement programs were almost always counterproductive.
For a few years, Mike Enoch was a doctrinaire libertarian. He started a blog called The Emptiness, where he wrote posts such as “Socialism Is Selfish” and “Taxation Is Theft.” His wife kept up her own blog, where she wrote reviews of local concerts and drag shows, but she always made time to support her husband’s autodidactic pursuits. When he changed the background of The Emptiness to a stock image of a gray funnel cloud, she commented, “Love the new tornado photo! This site is now a swirling vortex of emptiness!” In 2008, he got swept up in the excitement of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. Paul was just a protest candidate, but he still received millions of dollars in small donations and won far more votes than anyone predicted. Maybe what seemed like third-rail issues weren’t so untouchable after all.
Sometimes, when Mike Enoch saw his dad and stepmom in New Jersey, he tried to engage them in political debates. Did they really think that the Federal Reserve, an unelected group of plutocrats, deserved to dictate the fiscal policy of the world’s largest economy? He would grow adamant, pitching himself forward on the couch and raising his voice, but then his wife would touch him gently on the arm, and he would sit back and let his eyes go blank. “People often tell me that I’m too extreme,” he wrote on The Emptiness, in 2011. “This is all very conventional and sounds very nice, but quite often it is actually a load of crap and a form of bullying. People tend to get nervous and upset when you take an absolute moral stand on something. They do not like moral certainty, and they particularly do not like it when it can be backed up with logic and evidence.”
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After a while, he began to wonder whether libertarianism was too tepid. Its own premises, after all, pointed toward a starker conclusion: if the state was nothing but a hindrance to freedom, why not abolish the state altogether, leaving only the unfettered market? He began to call himself an anarcho-capitalist. One of the leading anarcho-capitalist thinkers was the German-born philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a former Murray Rothbard protégé who argued that government was not just a hindrance to freedom but “an institution run by gangs of murderers, plunderers and thieves, surrounded by willing executioners, propagandists, sycophants, crooks, liars, clowns, charlatans, dupes and useful idiots.” The New York Times referred to Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist, as “the grandmaster of free-market economic theory”; Hoppe referred to Friedman as “a socialist.”
